We examine the influence of guilt and trust on the performance of credence goods markets. An expert can make a promise to a consumer first, whereupon the consumer can express her trust by paying an interaction price before the expert's provision and charging decisions. We argue that the expert's...

We compare the behavior of car mechanics and college students as sellers in experimental credence goods markets. Finding largely similar behavior, we note much more overtreatment by car mechanics, probably due to decision heuristics they learned in their professional training.

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...

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...

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 prices and behave...

In this paper, we experimentally test the Modigliani-Miller theorem. Applying a general equilibrium approach and not allowing for arbitrage among firms with different capital structure, we are able to address a question fundamental to the valuation of firms: does capital structure affect the...

In the framework of expected utility theory, risk attitudes are entirely captured by the curvature of the utility function. In cumulative prospect theory (CPT) risk attitudes have an additional dimension: the weighting of probabilities. With this modification, one question arises naturally:...