Equilibrium information in credence goods

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Liu, Ting; Ma, Ching-to Albert
• 署名单位: State University of New York (SUNY) System; Stony Brook University; Boston University
• 刊物名称: GAMES AND ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0899-8256
• DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2024.03.002
• 发表日期: 2024
• 页码: 84-101
• 关键词: Credence goods; experts; Separating equilibrium; Pooling equilibrium; information acquisition

摘要

We study credence goods in a general model. A consumer may suffer a loss which is a continuous random variable. Privately observing the loss value, an expert can provide a repair at a price to eliminate the consumer's loss. All perfect-Bayesian equilibria are inefficient, in that some losses are not repaired. In closed form, we derive a pooling equilibrium (where losses are inferred to be in an interval), and a separating equilibrium (where losses are precisely inferred). If the expert can acquire an information structure on losses, the first best is achieved by a binary signal. Results are robust when cost and loss are random and correlated, and when there are multiple experts.