Policymakers and market intermediaries often use quality scores to alleviate asymmetric information about product quality. Scores affect the demand for quality and, in equilibrium, its supply. Equilibrium effects break the rule whereby more information is always better, and the optimal design of...

How do environmental information and awareness interact to improve environmental quality by changing consumer behavior and firm strategies? This article provides theoretical insights using an original differentiation model within a general framework whose specific cases have been studied...

This paper looks for evidence of adverse selection in the relationship between primary insurers and reinsurers. We test the implications of a model in which informational asymmetry – and therefore, its negative consequences – decline over time. Our tests involve a data panel consisting of...

We derive the optimal selling mechanism for a monopolist who is privately informed about the attributes of a horizontally differentiated good. To do so, we set up an informed principal problem in a Hotelling model where the buyer's preferences are described in terms of a base consumption value...

In "Marketing Information: A Competitive Analysis,'' Sarvary and Parker (1997) (S&P) [Marketing Science, 16(1): 24-38] argue that in part of the parameter space that they considered, a reduction in the price of one information product can lead to an increase in demand for another information...

We study the effects of improvements in market transparency on eBay on seller exit and continuing sellers' behavior. An improvement in market transparency by reducing strategic bias in buyer ratings led to a significant increase in buyer valuation especially of sellers rated poorly prior to the...

This paper studies how certification design is affected by the objective of the designer. Our model features a profit-maximizing certifier offering his services to the seller of a good of unknown quality. We allow for common values as the seller’s cost may depend on the quality of the good. We...

We study the effects of improvements in market transparency on eBay on seller exit and continuing sellers' behavior. An improvement in market transparency by reducing strategic bias in buyer ratings led to a significant increase in buyer valuation especially of sellers rated poorly prior to the...

We study the effects of improvements in market transparency on eBay on seller exit and continuing sellers’ behavior. An improvement in market transparency by reducing strategic bias in buyer ratings led to a significant increase in buyer valuation especially of sellers rated poorly prior to...