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The Demand for Tests

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Author Info
Thomas Liebi
Abstract

Many consumption goods have inherent attributes that are unknown to both consumers and producers of the good. This is reflected for example by the current discussion about potential harms of food products containing genetically modified organisms. The underlying paper analyzes consumers' demand for product tests in a surrounding of symmetric but imperfect information. It is shown that the demand for information of existing customers is higher than that of potential new ones. In addition, the introduction of an information market unambiguously lowers the product price. This is true, even though expected positive or negative quality news is symmetric in terms of monetary valuation.

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File URL: http://www.vwl.unibe.ch/papers/dp/dp0307.pdf
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Paper provided by Universitaet Bern, Departement Volkswirtschaft in its series Diskussionsschriften with number dp0307.

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Date of creation: May 2003
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Handle: RePEc:ube:dpvwib:dp0307

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Related research
Keywords: tests; imperfect; quality information; product quality;

Find related papers by JEL classification:
L15 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Information and Product Quality
D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information
D11 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior - - - Consumer Economics: Theory

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Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
  1. Jones, Philip & Hudson, John, 1996. "Signalling product quality: When is price relevant?," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 30(2), pages 257-266, August. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  2. Riordan, Michael H, 1986. "Monopolistic Competition with Experience Goods," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, MIT Press, vol. 101(2), pages 265-79, May. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  3. Cooper, Russell & Ross, Thomas W., 1985. "Monopoly provision of product quality with uninformed buyers," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 3(4), pages 439-449, December. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  4. Grossman, Sanford J & Stiglitz, Joseph E, 1980. "On the Impossibility of Informationally Efficient Markets," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 70(3), pages 393-408, June.
  5. Bester, Helmut & Ritzberger, Klaus, 1998. "Strategic Pricing, Signalling and Costly Information Acquisition," CEPR Discussion Papers 2032, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
    Other versions:
  6. Thomas Liebi, 2002. "Monitoring Eco-Labels: You Can Have Too Much of a Good Thing," Diskussionsschriften dp0207, Universitaet Bern, Departement Volkswirtschaft. [Downloadable!]
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