Consumers increasingly care about firms' ethical conduct (e.g., labor and environmental practices) when making their consumption choices. This note presents a simple framework to highlight the possibility that this development may induce a less desirable production technology choice and bring...

Online platforms provide search tools that help consumers to get better-fitting product offers. But this technology makes consumer search behavior also easily traceable and allows for real-time price discrimination. Consumers face a trade-off: Search intensely and receive a better fit at a...

The current study provides the first experimental test of the compromise effect, i.e. the tendency to choose middle options, in a naturally occurring setting. Simultaneously, I propose and evaluate a novel nudge intended to stimulate active choice - the (un)compromise effect - a compromise...

Abstract Most studies of competition in health care focus on prices and costs, but concerns about quality play a central role in policy debates. If demand is inelastic to quality, then competition may reduce patient welfare. This study uses a dataset of patient registrations for kidney...

Summary This paper examines, whether well prepared report cards affect hospital choice within Germany. We report three main findings. First: hospitals, which publish their quality data voluntarily, extend their market shares after relative to before publishing the quality data - compared to such...

In his book The Socialist Case, first published in 1937, Douglas Jay wrote: ‘in the case of nutrition and health, just as in the case of education, the gentleman in Whitehall really does know better what is good for people than the people know themselves.’ This phrase became notorious, and,...

Labels, certifications and endorsements signaling the quality of food have an impact on the purchasing choices of multiple segments of US consumers. At the same time, not much is known about the relationships between the sources providing information through these quality signals and consumer...

Residential consumers remain reluctant to choose new electricity suppliers. Even the most successful jurisdictions, four U.S. states and other countries, have had to adopt extensive consumer education procedures that serve largely to confirm that choosing electricity suppliers is daunting....

Trivial or irrelevant attributes are defined as attributes that do not create a meaningful difference in a brand’s performance. The objective of this paper is to determine if and how trivial attributes affect consumers in their choice of variety/brands of food products including frozen green...

Loss aversion, the fact that losses have a greater impact than gains, is a fundamental property of behavioral accounts of choice. In this paper, we suggest four possible characterizations of the relative impact of losses and gains: (1) It could be a constant, such as the much cited value of 2,...