Endogenous Entry in Markets with Unobserved Quality

Anthony Creane and Thomas Jeitschko

No 201206, EAG Discussions Papers from Department of Justice, Antitrust Division

Abstract: In markets for experience or credence goods adverse selection can drive out higher quality products and services. This negative implication of asymmetric information about product quality for trading and welfare, poses the question of how such markets first originate. We consider a market in which sellers make observable investment decisions to enter a market in which each seller's quality becomes private information. Entry has the tendency to lower prices, which may lead to adverse selection. The implied price collapse limits the amount of entry so that high prices are sustained in equilibrium, which results in above normal profits. The analysis suggests that rather than observing the canonical market collapse, markets with asymmetric information about product quality may instead be characterized by above normal profits even in markets with low measures of concentration and less entry than would be expected.

Keywords: adverse selection; asymmetric information; quality; experience goods; cre- dence goods; entry; entry barriers (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D4 D8 L1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 39 pages
Date: 2012-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-cta, nep-ind and nep-mic
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.justice.gov/atr/public/eag/285817a.html (text/html)

Related works:
Journal Article: Endogenous Entry in Markets with Unobserved Quality (2016)
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:doj:eagpap:201206

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in EAG Discussions Papers from Department of Justice, Antitrust Division Department of Justice Antitrust Division 450 Fifth Street NW Washington, DC 20530. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tung Vu ().