Asymmetric information can distort market outcomes. I study how the online disclosure of information affects consumers' behavior and firms' incentives to upgrade product quality in markets where information is traditionally limited. I first build a model of consumer search with firms' endogenous...

Why do low income patients tend to go to lower quality health care providers, even when they are free? We show that differential information about provider quality is an important determinant of this disparity. Our empirical strategy exploits the temporary presence of a website that publicly...

Quality credit has attracted considerable interest in both academia and business world in recent years in China. This study aims to discuss the development of quality credit evaluation system, and then based on an Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to construct an evaluation system for Internet...

In a complex and dynamic business environment, managers widely appeal to modern methods and techniques that would help them cope with the competition and offer their customers new, attractive, good quality products and services and at competitive prices. In this context, total quality management...

Since 2009, German nursing homes have been evaluated regularly with quality report cards published online. We argue that most of the information in the report cards does not reliably measure quality of care, but a subset of seven measures does. Using a sample of more than 3,000 nursing homes...

In recent years, several countries have introduced non-monetary performance incentives for health care providers to improve the quality of medical care. Evidence on the effect of non-monetary feedback incentives, predominantly in the form of public quality reporting, on the quality of medical...

This paper addresses the concept of quality risk in outsourcing. Recent trends in outsourcing extend a contract manufacturer's (CM's) responsibility to several functional areas such as research and development and design in addition to manufacturing. This trend enables an original equipment...

Using a newly constructed dataset on German hospitals, which includes 24 process and outcome indicators of clinical quality, we test whether quality has increased in various clinical areas since the introduction of mandatory quality reports and the online publication of part of the collected...

La protección de los consumidores de telefonía móvil está cobrando relevancia, en parte porque la satisfacción de los consumidores en nuestro país es inferior a la de otros países europeos. Históricamente la normativa de protección al consumidor se ha centrado primero en mediciones...

This paper analyzes the behavior of monopoly firm serving its products to two countries. The main focus of this paper is on how the product-quality choice in different markets are related with the cost structure of the firm. First, This paper examines the effects of production and R&D costs on...