Who gains from more information on the quality of pharmaceutical drugs? Are there incentives for voluntary post-approval clinical trials among pharmaceutical companies? Contrary to popular belief, this paper shows that it is not in the consumer interest that clinical evidence establishing the...

Econometric analysis of 113 online pharmacies finds that quality of service is higher for online pharmacies with insurance coverage and those that also run conventional pharmacies and have been open for a longer time. The significant impact of insurance coverage suggests that provision of...

Using econometric evidence, this article confirms that distribution of medicines online is split into two market segments of very diverse quality, and identifies the factors that drive quality and quality assurance in this activity. Unlike fraudulent, 'rogue,' websites, which offer scant...

This paper investigates the informational content of online reviews. For the case of hotels, we model how the length of the stay shapes the variance of review scores. Grounded on violations of temporal monotonicity, errors in recall and hedonic adaptation theories, we first present a...

We consider an oligopolistic market where firms compete in price and quality and where consumers are heterogeneous in knowledge: some consumers know both the prices and quality of the products offered, some know only the prices and some know neither. We show that two types of signalling...

There is widespread evidence that some firms use false advertising to overstate the value of their products. Using a model in which a policymaker is able to punish such false claims, we characterize a natural equilibrium in which false advertising actively influences rational buyers. We analyze...

There is widespread evidence that some firms use false advertising to overstate the value of their products. We consider a model in which a policymaker is able to punish such false claims. We characterize an equilibrium where false advertising actively influences rational buyers, and analyze the...

One striking development associated with the explosion of e-commerce is the increased transparency of sellers' quality history. In this paper we analyze how this affects firms' incentives to invest in quality when the outcome of investment is uncertain. We identify two conflicting effects. On...

In some markets, consumers do not know the attributes of all the products that are available in the market, or the prices at which they are offered. To reduce this uncertainty consumers may, at a cost, gather and process information about the attributes and prices of the different products. The...

Firms sometimes nurture long lines, rather than raising prices to eliminate waiting times. We justify this practice by considering the informational role of a queue in a setting in which a firm can also adjust its price to signal its quality to uninformed consumers. When the proportion of...