IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/edn/esedps/280.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

It's Good to be Bad. A Model of Low Quality Dominance in a Full Information Consumer Search Market

Author

Abstract

This paper examines a consumer search market exhibiting vertically differentiated firms, heterogeneous consumers and endogenous consumer market entry. In an asymmetric information setting high and low quality firms make equal sales and profit in this market. Conversely when there is full information, search frictions induce an unravelling mechanism that leads to a unique re ned equilibrium where all consumers approach low quality firms and high quality firms make no sales or profit. This presents a rationale for why low quality firms may disclose their quality and high quality firms may not even when disclosure is costless.

Suggested Citation

  • Stuart Baumann & Margaryta Klymak, 2017. "It's Good to be Bad. A Model of Low Quality Dominance in a Full Information Consumer Search Market," Edinburgh School of Economics Discussion Paper Series 280, Edinburgh School of Economics, University of Edinburgh.
    • Handle: RePEc:edn:esedps:280
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.econ.ed.ac.uk/papers/id280_esedps.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Diamond, Peter A., 1971. "A model of price adjustment," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 3(2), pages 156-168, June.
    2. Fabio Caldieraro & Dongsoo Shin & Andrew Stivers, 2011. "Voluntary Quality Disclosure under Price‐Signaling Competition," Managerial and Decision Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 32, pages 493-504, December.
    3. Paul R. Milgrom, 1981. "Good News and Bad News: Representation Theorems and Applications," Bell Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 12(2), pages 380-391, Autumn.
    4. George A. Akerlof, 1970. "The Market for "Lemons": Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 84(3), pages 488-500.
    5. Oliver Board, 2009. "Competition And Disclosure," Journal of Industrial Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 57(1), pages 197-213, March.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Hong, Xianpei & Zhou, Menghuan & Gong, Yeming, 2021. "Dilemma of quality information disclosure in technology licensing," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 294(2), pages 543-557.
    2. Kwon, Illoong & Jun, Daesung, 2015. "Information disclosure and peer effects in the use of antibiotics," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 42(C), pages 1-16.
    3. Agostino Manduchi, 2013. "Non-neutral information costs with match-value uncertainty," Journal of Economics, Springer, vol. 109(1), pages 1-25, May.
    4. Simon P. Anderson & Régis Renault, 2013. "The Advertising Mix for a Search Good," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 59(1), pages 69-83, April.
    5. Creane, Anthony & Jeitschko, Thomas D. & Sim, Kyoungbo, 2022. "Welfare effects of product certification under latent adverse selection," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 81(C).
    6. Mark Armstrong, 2015. "Search and Ripoff Externalities," Review of Industrial Organization, Springer;The Industrial Organization Society, vol. 47(3), pages 273-302, November.
    7. repec:dau:papers:123456789/12407 is not listed on IDEAS
    8. Xinyu Li & Ronald Peeters, 2017. "Rivalry information acquisition and disclosure," Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 26(3), pages 610-623, September.
    9. Liang Guo, 2020. "Upstream Exploitation and Strategic Disclosure," Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 39(5), pages 923-938, September.
    10. Belleflamme,Paul & Peitz,Martin, 2015. "Industrial Organization," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9781107687899.
    11. Andrew F. Daughety & Jennifer F. Reinganum, 2008. "Communicating quality: a unified model of disclosure and signalling," RAND Journal of Economics, RAND Corporation, vol. 39(4), pages 973-989, December.
    12. Bruce Ian Carlin & Shaun William Davies & Andrew Miles Iannaccone, 2010. "Competing for Attention in Financial Markets," NBER Working Papers 16085, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    13. Fatas, Enrique & Morales, Antonio J. & Sonntag, Axel, 2020. "Empowering consumers to reduce corporate tax avoidance: Theory and Experiments," IHS Working Paper Series 21, Institute for Advanced Studies.
    14. Ginger Zhe Jin & Andrew Kato & John A. List, 2010. "That’S News To Me! Information Revelation In Professional Certification Markets," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 48(1), pages 104-122, January.
    15. Moraga-González, José L. & Sándor, Zsolt & Wildenbeest, Matthijs R., 2014. "Prices, Product Differentiation, And Heterogeneous Search Costs," IESE Research Papers D/1097, IESE Business School.
    16. Pierre Fleckinger & Matthieu Glachant & Gabrielle Moineville, 2017. "Incentives for Quality in Friendly and Hostile Informational Environments," American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 9(1), pages 242-274, February.
    17. Haisken-DeNew, John & Hasan, Syed & Jha, Nikhil & Sinning, Mathias, 2018. "Unawareness and selective disclosure: The effect of school quality information on property prices," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 145(C), pages 449-464.
    18. Konrad Stahl & Roland Strausz, 2017. "Certification and Market Transparency," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 84(4), pages 1842-1868.
    19. Simon Schopohl, 2017. "Communication Games with Optional Verification," Université Paris1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (Post-Print and Working Papers) halshs-01490688, HAL.
    20. Janssen, Maarten, 2017. "Regulating False Discloure," VfS Annual Conference 2017 (Vienna): Alternative Structures for Money and Banking 168159, Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association.
    21. B. Charumathi & Latha Ramesh, 2020. "Impact of Voluntary Disclosure on Valuation of Firms: Evidence from Indian Companies," Vision, , vol. 24(2), pages 194-203, June.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Consumer Search; Quality Disclosure;

    JEL classification:

    • D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design
    • D83 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief; Unawareness
    • L15 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Information and Product Quality

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:edn:esedps:280. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Research Office (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/deediuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.