In credence goods markets, experts have better information about the appropriate quality of treatment than their customers. As experts provide both diagnosis and treatment, this leaves scope for fraud. We experimentally investigate how intensity of price competition and the level of customer...

This paper investigates the impact of four key economic variables on an expert firm’s incentive to defraud its customers in a credence goods market: the level of competition, the expert firm’s financial situation, its competence, and its reputational concerns. We use and complement the...

We experimentally investigate the role of second opinions in markets where experts like doctors both diagnose and provide the services. Experts may exploit their informational advantage over customers and overtreat by providing a more costly and expensive treatment than necessary. We show that...

We examine bidding behavior in first-price sealed-bid and Dutch auctions, which are strategically equivalent under standard preferences. We investigate whether the empirical breakdown of this equivalence is due to (non-standard) preferences or due to the different complexity of the two formats...

We analyze a situation in which two horizontally differentiated firms compete in two-part tariffs (i.e., a linear and fixed price), and some consumers are not informed about the linear per-unit price. We show that there is a non-monotone relationship between the degree of consumer-side...

We analyze firms' ability to sustain collusion in a setting in which horizontally differentiated firms can price-discriminate based on private information regarding consumers' preferences. In particular, firms receive private signals which can be noisy (e.g., big data predictions). We find that...

We experimentally examine the effects of drip pricing on seller strategies and buyer behavior as well as the implications for regulation. Sellers set two prices: a base price and a drip price. At first, buyers only observe the base prices and make a tentative purchase decision. Revealing the...

Rules of consumer protection or fair competition can be publicly or privately enforced. We consider the possibility of false advertising by a firm in duopolistic competition where consumers can be distinguished according to whether or not they form rational beliefs about the trustworthiness of...