Vague Lies: How to Advise Consumers When They Complain

Mikhail Drugov and Marta Troya Martinez

No 9201, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: This paper analyzes the incentives of a seller to provide (un)biased and (im)precise advice about a complex product such as insurance, banking and telecommunication services. Misleading the buyers by biasing the advice upwards increases the revenues but also the expected fine imposed by the authority. Making the advice less precise does not affect the revenues in equilibrium but interferes with the authority's inference and affects the expected fine in a non-monotonic way. In particular, making the advice less precise makes it harder to convict the seller but increases the expected fine when the seller is found guilty. We find that, in the equilibrium, biasing the advice and making it noisier are complements; in particular, a higher buyers' heterogeneity, a stricter standard of proof employed by the authority and a larger share of credulous consumers make the advice more biased and less precise.

Keywords: Advice; Persuasion; Legal procedure; Consumer protection (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D18 D8 K4 L1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mic
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP9201 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:9201

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP9201

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().