Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/224590 
Year of Publication: 
2020
Series/Report no.: 
Beiträge zur Jahrestagung des Vereins für Socialpolitik 2020: Gender Economics
Publisher: 
ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, Kiel, Hamburg
Abstract: 
We study a credence goods problem - that is, a moral hazard problem with non-contractible outcome - where altruistic experts (the agents) care both about their income and the utility of consumers (the principals). Experts' preferences over income and their consumers' utility are convex, such that experts care less for consumers when their financial situation is bad. In a market setting with multiple consumers per expert, a cross-consumer externality arises: one consumer's payment raises the expert's income, which makes the non-selfish part of preferences more important and thereby induces the expert to provide higher quality services to all consumers. The externality renders the market outcome inefficient. Price regulation partially overcomes this inefficiency and Pareto-improves upon the market outcome. If market entry of experts is endogenous, price regulation should be accompanied by licensing arrangements that cap the number of experts in the market. Our theory provides a novel rationale for the wide-spread use of price regulation and licensing in real-world markets for expert services.
Subjects: 
altruism
asymmetric information
common agency
credence goods
expert services
externality
inefficiency
moral hazard
regulation
JEL: 
D64
D82
D86
L15
L51
Document Type: 
Conference Paper

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