A solution to marketplace information asymmetries is to have trading partners publicly rate each other post-transaction. Many have shown that these ratings are effective; we show that their effectiveness deteriorates over time. The problem is that ratings are prone to inflation, with raters...

When product or service quality cannot be well-specified ex-ante because of uncertainty and information asymmetry, consumer surplus (CS) is not well-defined or known ex-ante. Traditional measures of CS have implicitly assumed that the quality expected is the same as the quality that is paid for....

When product or service quality cannot be well-specified ex-ante because of uncertainty and information asymmetry, consumer surplus (CS) is not well-defined or known ex-ante. Traditional measures of CS have implicitly assumed that the quality expected is the same as the quality that is paid for....