When there are many attributes, experiments with Conjoint Analysis include problems of information overload that affect the validity of such experiments. The impact of these problems can be avoided or reduced by using Hierarchical Information Integration (HII). The present work aims to...

Established firms accumulate a significant body of knowledge, expertise and capabilities that are often secondary to their central revenue generating activities. How do they leverage this expertise in non-core technology into future value creation opportunities? In this paper we examine an...

Several Japanese local governments started to add endogenous minimum prices to firstprice auctions in their public procurements. Any bid less than the endogenous minimum price is referred to as abnormally low and is excluded from the procurement procedure. The endogenous minimum price is...

This paper reports the theoretical and experimental results of auctions for public construction in which firms cut corners. We show that winning bids and qualities of the constructed buildings are both zero in equilibria if there are at least two firms whose initial cash balances are zero. The...

An advisor is supposed to recommend a financial product in the best interest of her client. However, the best product for the client may not always be the product yielding the highest commission to the advisor. Do advisors nevertheless provide truthful advice? If not, will a voluntary or...

The market for retail financial products (e.g. investment funds or insurance) is marred by information asymmetries. Clients are not well informed about the quality of these products. They have to rely on the recommendations of advisors. Incentives of advisors and clients may not be aligned, when...

This paper examines the incentives of a firm to invest in information about the quality of its product and to disclose its findings. If the firm holds back information, it might be detected and fined. We show that optimal monitoring is determined by a trade-off. Stricter enforcement reduces the...

The theory of voluntary disclosure of information posits that market forces lead senders to disclose information through a process of unravelling. This prediction requires that receivers hold correct beliefs and, in equilibrium, make adverse inferences about non-disclosed information. Previous...

The author reexamines the Schmalensee effect from a dynamic perspective. Schmalsensee’s argument suggesting that high quality can be signaled by high prices is based on the assumption that higher quality necessarily incurs higher production cost. In this paper, the author argues that firms...

We study the impact of communication on behavior in a two-stage coordination game with asymmetric payoffs. We test experimentally whether individuals can avoid a head-to-head confrontation by means of coordinated strategies. In particular we analyze whether and how quickly a conflict-avoidance...