This paper investigates the relationship between contract manufacturing and quality risk — a term defined as the propensity of a manufacturing plant to operate out of compliance with required procedures. Contract manufacturing plants (hereafter, CM) are increasingly being used in many...

The quality of output is of great concern to firms, consumers and regulators and yet firms' decisions concerning quality receive far less attention from economists than quantity or pricing decisions. There is a substantial management literature on product quality which, to some extent, discusses...

Public and private entities around the world are trying to induce the provision of higher-quality health care by adopting institutional arrangements intended to promote competition among care providers. I selectively survey and supplement the literature to show that an increase in...

This paper provides a formal analysis of persuasive advertising when firms compete for consumers with heterogenous social attitudes towards the consumption by others. Deriving product demand from primitives, we show that the demand-enhancing effect of persuasive advertising varies across...

Emotions are a significant determinant of consumer behavior. A customer may get angry if he feels that he is being treated unfairly by his supplier and that anger may make him more likely to switch to an alternative provider. We model the strategic interaction between firms that choose quality...

According to the quality signaling theory, firms are motivated to invest more advertising in high-quality products. This paper conducts an experiment through a closed-ended double-bounded dichotomous choice of the contingent valuation method to measure consumer willingness-to-pay for a...

At least since Akerlof (1970), asymmetric information in the case of experience goods has been a central issue in the economic literature. This paper studies regulation in markets where the quality of the experience good is never completely verifiable by consumers even after purchase. In the...

Advertising and price have been shown to signal product quality. Most works limit the number of types to high and low quality. I characterize the optimal separating marketing strategy when both quality and marginal cost are uncertain and continuous variables.

We consider an oligopolistic market where firms compete in price and quality and where consumers have heterogeneous information: some consumers know both the prices, and quality of the products offered, some know only the prices, and some know neither. We show that if there are sufficiently many...

Based on my recent work with several co-authors this paper explores the relationship between discretion, reputation, competition and entry in procurement markets. I focus especially on public procurement, which is highly regulated for accountability and trade reasons. In Europe regulation...