Fedele Alessandro, Tedeschi Piero
School of Economics and Management, Free University of Bozen/Bolzano, Bozen/Bolzano, Italy.
Department of Economics and Finance, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy.
PLoS One. 2014 Oct 17;9(10):e110233. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0110233. eCollection 2014.
The economics models of reputation and quality in markets can be classified in three categories. (i) Pure hidden action, where only one type of seller is present who can provide goods of different quality. (ii) Pure hidden information, where sellers of different types have no control over product quality. (iii) Mixed frameworks, which include both hidden action and hidden information. In this paper we develop a pure hidden action model of reputation and Bertrand competition, where consumers and firms interact repeatedly in a market with free entry. The price of the good produced by the firms is contractible, whilst the quality is noncontractible, hence it is promised by the firms when a contract is signed. Consumers infer future quality from all available information, i.e., both from what they know about past quality and from current prices. According to early contributions, competition should make reputation unable to induce the production of high-quality goods. We provide a simple solution to this problem by showing that high quality levels are sustained as an outcome of a stationary symmetric equilibrium.
市场中声誉和质量的经济模型可分为三类。（i）纯粹的隐藏行动，即只有一种类型的卖家，他们可以提供不同质量的商品。（ii）纯粹的隐藏信息，即不同类型的卖家无法控制产品质量。（iii）混合框架，其中包括隐藏行动和隐藏信息。在本文中，我们构建了一个声誉和伯特兰竞争的纯粹隐藏行动模型，其中消费者和企业在一个自由进入的市场中反复互动。企业生产的商品价格是可契约化的，而质量是不可契约化的，因此在签订合同时由企业承诺。消费者从所有可用信息中推断未来质量，即既从他们对过去质量的了解，也从当前价格中推断。根据早期的研究，竞争应该会使声誉无法促使高质量商品的生产。我们通过表明高质量水平作为一个平稳对称均衡的结果得以维持，为这个问题提供了一个简单的解决方案。
