In this paper, I conduct one of the first evaluations of a voluntary management program that features an independent verification mechanism to determine whether it is achieving its ultimate objectives. Using a sample of thousands of manufacturing facilities across the United States, I find...

There is a harmful mismatch between how information published by the government is perceived—as highly trustworthy—and the reality that it is often not. This Article shows that the government frequently collects information from third-party private entities and publishes it with no review or...

We study the optimal contracts (payment and extraction path) implemented by a regulator unable to commit to long term contracts that delegates the extraction of a nonrenewable resource to a firm. The regulator wishes to maximize the tax revenue and does not know the firm's efficiency which is...

Who does, and who should initiate costly certification by a third party under asymmetric quality information, the buyer or the seller? Our answer - the seller - follows from a nontrivial analysis revealing a clear intuition. Buyer-induced certification acts as an inspection device,...

This paper proposes a model for a certification market with an imperfect testing technology. Such a technology only assures that whenever two products are tested the higher quality product is more likely to pass than the lower quality one. When only one certifier with such testing technology is...

This paper investigates the impact of four key economic variables on an expert firm's incentive to defraud its customers in a credence goods market: the level of competition, the expert firm's financial situation, its competence, and its reputational concerns. We use and complement the dataset...

This paper investigates the impact of four key economic variables on an expert firm’s incentive to defraud its customers in a credence goods market: the level of competition, the expert firm’s financial situation, its competence, and its reputational concerns. We use and complement the...

In a standard adverse selection world, asymmetric information about product quality leads to quality deterioration in the market. Suppose that a higher investment level makes the realization of high quality more likely. Then, if consumers observe the investment (but not the realization of...

This paper analyzes bilateral contracting in an environment with contractual incompleteness and asymmetric information. One party (the seller) makes an unverifiable quality choice and the other party (the buyer) has private information about its valuation. A simple exit option contract, which...

Insurance intermediation services are information services which exhibit strong information asymmetries. We empirically analyze whether signaling works in the German market for insurance intermediation services. For this a signal must increase service quality and be easily identifiable by...