Masterful Meisters? Voluntary Certification and Quality in the German Crafts Sector

Fredriksen Kaja, Runst Petrik and Bizer Kilian
Additional contact information
Fredriksen Kaja: Institute for Small Business Economics, ifh Göttingen,Göttingen, Germany
Runst Petrik: Institute for Small Business Economics, ifh Göttingen,Gõttingen, Germany
Bizer Kilian: Goettingen University,Göttingen, Germany

German Economic Review, 2019, vol. 20, issue 1, 83-104

Abstract: Voluntary certification systems potentially reduce search costs in markets with imperfect information. Service markets with many heterogeneous firms - such as the crafts market - are prone to information imperfections and can therefore potentially benefit from such informational mechanisms. We examine if the Meister qualification in the German crafts sector improves service quality as perceived by consumers. We find a significant and positive relationship between the Meister title and consumer ratings and conclude that the certificate is a credible sign of quality.

Keywords: Transaction costs; search costs; voluntary certification; service quality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/geer.12158 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

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:bpj:germec:v:20:y:2019:i:1:p:83-104

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/ger/html

DOI: 10.1111/geer.12158

Access Statistics for this article

German Economic Review is currently edited by Peter Egger, Almut Balleer, Jesus Crespo-Cuaresma, Mario Larch, Aderonke Osikominu and Georg Wamser

More articles in German Economic Review from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().