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Experts vs. discounters: consumer free riding and experts withholding advice in markets for credence goods

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This paper studies price competition between experts and discounters in a market for credence goods. While experts can identify a consumer’s problem by exerting costly but unobservable diagnosis effort, discounters just sell treatments without giving any advice. The unobservability of diagnosis effort induces experts to use their tariffs as signaling devices. This makes them vulnerable to competition by discounters. We explore the conditions under which experts survive competition by discounters and find that there exist situations in which adding a single customer to a large population of existing consumers leads to a switch from an experts only to a discounters only market. We also discuss whether vertical restraints can alleviate these inefficiencies.

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  • Uwe Dulleck & Rudolf Kerschbamer, 2005. "Experts vs. discounters: consumer free riding and experts withholding advice in markets for credence goods," Economics working papers 2005-09, Department of Economics, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria.
    • Handle: RePEc:jku:econwp:2005_09
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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Experts; Discounters; Credence Goods; Vertical Restraints;
    All these keywords.

    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; Mechanism Design
    • D40 - Microeconomics - - Market Structure, Pricing, and Design - - - General

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