Practices

Max Blouin and Jean-Marc Bourgeon

Working Papers from HAL

Abstract: We examine an economy where professionals provide services to clients and where a professional can sell his practice to another. Professionals vary in quality, and clients in their need (or willingness-to-pay) for high-quality service. efficiency is measured as the number of matches between high-quality professionals and high-need clients. However, agent types are unobservable a priori. We find that trade in practices can facilitate the transmission of information about agent types; sometimes full efficiency is achieved. In cases where it is not, a tax on the sale of practices (based on the seller's age) can be used to achieve full efficiency. In addition, a ceiling on the price of services can be used to adjust the distribution of surplus between clients and professionals, while preserving efficiency.

Keywords: signaling; professional services; practices; goodwill (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-06
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-00360512
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-00360512/document (application/pdf)

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:hal:wpaper:hal-00360512

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().