Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/162941 
Year of Publication: 
2017
Series/Report no.: 
cege Discussion Papers No. 317
Publisher: 
University of Göttingen, Center for European, Governance and Economic Development Research (cege), Göttingen
Abstract: 
We investigate a market in which experts have a moral hazard problem because they need to invest in costly but unobservable effort to identify consumer problems. Experts have either high or low qualification and can invest either high or low effort in their diagnosis. High skilled experts are able to identify problems with some probability even with low effort while low skilled experts here always give false recommendations. Experts compete for consumers by setting prices for diagnosis and service. Consumers can visit multiple experts, which enables an endogenous verifiability of diagnosis. We show that with a sufficient number of high skilled experts, stable second-best and perfectly non-degenerate equilibria are possible even with flexible prices, although they depend on transactions costs being relatively low. By contrast, with a small share of high skilled experts in the market, setting fixed prices can be beneficial for society.
Subjects: 
credence goods
expert market
moral hazard
qualification
competition
second opinions
diagnostic effort
JEL: 
L10
D82
D40
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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