This paper studies the incentives for credence goods experts to invest effort in diagnosis if effort is both costly and unobservable, and if they face competition by discounters who are not able to perform a diagnosis. The unobservability of diagnosis effort and the credence characteristic of...

Article VI of the GATT allows counter measures of goods are sold on a foreign market at a price below average production plus transportation costs. The present article analyzes Article VI based on a simple game theoretic model with two countries and economies of scale in the production of one...

Politicians and economists of transition countries fear a low-quality trap for their economies. We present a model of international trade with two countries and two qualities of goods model where high-quality production exhibits economies of scale and low-quality production does not. Depending...

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...

Although paying taxes is a key element in a well-functioning civilized society, the understanding of why people pay taxes is still limited. What current evidence shows is that, given relatively low audit probabilities and penalties in case of tax evasion, compliance levels are higher than would...

We study discrimination based on the hukou system, a policy segregating migrants and locals in urban China. We hired household aids as participants in our artefactual field experiment and use a gift exchange game to study labor market discrimination. We find that social discrimination based on...

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...

The dark side of the Balkans (the shadow economy in Southeastern Europe) (by Edward Christie and Mario Holzner) Are CEECs trapped in low-quality export specialization? (by Uwe Dullek, Neil Foster, Robert Stehrer and Julia Wörz) Do interest rate differentials determine the movements in the...

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 breakdown. We study in a large experiment with 936 participants the determinants for efficiency in credence goods...

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...