We model competition for a multi-attribute service, like health care services, where consumers observe attribute quality imprecisely before deciding on a provider. High quality in one attribute is more important in terms of ex post utility. Attribute quality is stochastic, providers can shift...

Traditional business models of credit rating agencies (CRAs) are criticized for creating incentives for misreporting. This paper investigates a potential alternative in which CRAs receive revenue from advertisement only. We use a two-period Bayesian reputation model and show that CRAs will shirk...

A recent strand of the literature shows that the adoption of different lending technologies is associated with heterogeneous credit policies and performance. Using a unique Bank of Italy?s survey, specifically designed to capture some organizational features and the lending techniques adopted by...

Using quarterly data of 58 countries, this paper provides empirical evidence that mobile phone diffusion from 2007 to 2009 is positively influenced by international network effects. Direct and indirect network effects are a result of the international standadization of telecommunication...

The fruit production is a competitive and dynamic sector with many uncertainties coming from fruit biology, diseases and pests that attack them, the climate change, the distribution market and the complexity of logistics activities. Post-harvest handling activities can considerably improve the...

We consider a situation of duopolistic competition in which one firm may (falsely) advertise high product quality. Consumers are heterogeneous. One group forms rational beliefs about quality, whereas some consumers are naive and fully trust any advertisement. We compare two scenarios in which...

Firms can communicate private information about product quality through a combination of pricing and disclosure where disclosure may be deliberately false. We examine the effect of regulation that penalizes false disclosure by firms in a competitive setting. The cost of false disclosure...

We build a model of collective reputation under moral hazard to analyze incentives under collective reputation. Producers can produce high quality, but it is only imperfectly detected. Products not detected as of high quality are pooled by to the collective reputation structure. Collective...

Labels signaling sustainable product attributes are gaining importance, although uncertainty concerning the environmental, micro- and macroeconomic benefits of such labels persist. One of the questions still incom-pletely answered is whether Willingness To Pay (WTP) varies with a gradually...

Credence goods markets, such as those for car repairs and medical treatments, are generally characterized by an ex-ante and ex-post information asymmetry between the uninformed buyer and the informed seller. Previous literature demonstrates that efficiency and fraud in a monopolist credence...