Search and Competition in Expert Markets
研究了消费者在专家市场中搜索治疗建议和价格时，搜索成本如何影响专家欺骗行为和定价，发现搜索成本降低反而可能增加欺骗和价格，但足够低时竞争会迫使专家诚实。
ABSTRACT We analyze a model where consumers sequentially search experts for treatment recommendations and prices, facing either zero or a positive search cost, whereas experts simultaneously compete in these two dimensions. In equilibrium, experts may “cheat” by overstating the severity of a consumer's problem and recommending an unnecessary treatment, prices follow distributions depending on the problem type and the treatment, and consumers employ Bayesian belief updating about their problem types during search. Paradoxically, as search cost decreases, expert cheating and prices can both increase stochastically. However, if search cost is sufficiently small, competition will force all experts to behave honestly.