This paper studies the influence of information on entry choices in a competition with a controlled laboratory experiment. We investigate whether information provision attracts mainly high productivity individuals and reduces competition failure, where competition failure occurs when a subject...

Theoretically and experimentally, we generalize the analysis of acquiring a company (Samuelson and Bazerman 1985) by allowing for competition of both, buyers and sellers. Naivety of both is related to the idea that higher prices exclude worse qualities. While competition of naive buyers...

In an information cascade experiment participants are confronted with artificial predecessors predicting in line with the BHW model (Bikchandani et al. 1992). Using the BDM (Becker et al., 1964) mechanism we study participants' probability perceptions based on maximum prices for participating in...

Credence goods markets suffer from inefficiencies arising from informational asymmetries between expert sellers and customers. While standard theory predicts that inefficiencies disappear if customers can verify the quality received, verifiability fails to yield efficiency in experiments with...

We examine the influence of guilt and trust on the performance of credence goods markets. An expert can make a promise to a consumer first, whereupon the consumer can express her trust by paying an interaction price before the expert's provision and charging decisions. We argue that the expert's...

Credence goods markets are characterized by asymmetric information between sellers and consumers that may give rise to inefficiencies, such as under- and overtreatment or market break-down. We study in a large experiment with 936 participants the determinants for efficiency in credence goods...

Using a symmetric 2-person prisoners' dilemma as the base game, each player receives a signal for the number of rounds to be played with the same partner. The actual number of rounds (the length of the supergame) is determined by the maximal signal where each player expects the other's signal to...

Informational asymmetries abound in economic decision making and often provide an incentive for deception through telling a lie or misrepresenting information. In this paper I use a cheap-talk sender-receiver experiment to show that telling the truth should be classified as deception too if the...

This experimental study investigates two bargaining games with twosided incomplete information between a seller and a buyer. In the first game with no outside options many subjects do not use the incomplete information to their advantage as predicted. We find that a model with adjusting priors...

We compare the behavior of car mechanics and college students as sellers in experimental credence goods markets. Finding largely similar behavior, we note much more overtreatment by car mechanics, probably due to decision heuristics they learned in their professional training.