Starting a firm with expansive potential is an option for educated and high-skilled workers. This option serves as an insurance against unemployment caused by labor market frictions and hence increases the incentives for education. We show within a matching model that reducing the start-up costs...

In this article we propose a two stage procedure to model demand decisions by customers who are balancing several dimensions of a product. We then test our procedure by analyzing the behavior of buyers from an Austrian price comparison site. Although in such a market a consumer will typically...

This paper studies price competition between experts and discounters in a market for credence goods. While experts can identify a consumer’s problem by exerting costly but unobservable diagnosis effort, discounters just sell treatments without giving any advice. The unobservability of...

Starting a firm with expansive potential is an option for educated and high-skilled workers. This option serves as an insurance against unemployment caused by labor market frictions and hence increases the incentives for education. We show within a matching model that reducing the start-up costs...

We study all-pay auctions with budget-constrained bidders who have access to fair insurance before bidding simultaneously over a prize. We characterize a unique equilibrium for the special cases of two bidders and one prize, show existence and a heuristic for finding an equilibrium in the case...

This article studies the use of different distribution channels as an instrument of price discrimination in credence goods markets. In credence goods markets, where consumers do not know which quality of the good or service they need, price discrimination proceeds along the dimension of quality...

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...

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...

In this article we propose a two stage procedure to model demand decisions by customers who are balancing several dimensions of a product. We then test our procedure by analyzing the behavior of buyers from an Austrian price comparison site. Although in such a market a consumer will typically...

Credence goods markets suffer from inefficiencies caused by superior information of sellers about the surplus-maximizing quality. While standard theory predicts that equal mark-up prices solve the credence goods problem if customers can verify the quality received, experimental evidence...