Cursed Consumers and the Effectiveness of Consumer Protection Policies*
研究了在消费者对未披露质量缺乏怀疑（被诅咒消费者）的双寡头市场中，企业如何利用这一行为，并发现常见的消费者保护政策可能反而加剧剥削、降低福利。
We model firms' quality disclosure and pricing in the presence of cursed consumers, who fail to be sufficiently skeptical about undisclosed quality. We show that cursed consumers are exploited in duopoly if firms are vertically differentiated, if there are few cursed consumers, and if average product quality is high. Three common consumer protection policies that work under monopoly, that is, mandatory disclosure, third party disclosure and consumer education, may all increase exploitation and decrease welfare. Even where these policies improve welfare, they often lead to a reduction in consumer surplus. Our conclusions hold in extensions with endogenous quality and horizontal differentiation.