We analyze the strategic decision of firms to voluntarily certify corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices in a context where other firms can falsely pretend to be socially responsible. Equilibrium outcomes are crucially determined by consumers' beliefs about the credibility of firms' CSR...

Empirical literature on moral hazard focuses exclusively on the direct impact of asymmetric information on market outcomes, thus ignoring possible repercussions. We present a field experiment in which we consider a phenomenon that we call second-degree moral hazard - the tendency of the supply...

Credence goods, such as car repairs or medical services, are characterized by severe informational asymmetries between sellers and consumers, leading to fraud in the form of provision of insufficient service (undertreatment), provision of unnecessary service (overtreatment) and charging too much...

Evidence on behavior of experts in credence goods markets raises an important causality issue: Do ”fair prices” induce ”good behavior”, or do ”good experts” post ”fair prices”? To answer this question we propose and test a model with three seller types: ”the good” choose fair...