讲座时间：2025年11月20日（周四）13:30-15:00

讲座地点：科研楼1109室

主讲人：宋哲炜，u8国际

主持人：李川川，u8国际

题目：Defensive Overtreatment in Credence Goods Markets: Causes and Solutions from Informational and Normative Perspectives

In credence goods markets, when a buyer encounters a problem that needs treatment, only sellers have the expertise to determine which type of treatment is sufficient to solve the buyer’s problem. Adequate treatment can maximize buyers’ expected utility, but sometimes it cannot guarantee to solve the problem with a 100% probability, so a treatment failure is not necessarily caused by undertreatment but can just be an accident. Not knowing the true cause of a treatment failure, buyers can demand compensation to force sellers to compensate them. To avoid compensation, sellers will “defend” themselves by providing overtreatment ex-ante to minimize the probability of failure. However, the high cost of overtreatment will result in a Pareto-inefficient outcome. This study investigates whether this inefficiency can be alleviated through a reputation system and/or an informational nudge. I show that the reputation system and/or the nudge can theoretically lead to Pareto improvement. My laboratory experiment results show that the presence of both approaches significantly reduces sellers’ likelihood of overtreatment and significantly improves consumer surplus, while buyers’ demand behavior is less responsive to these approaches. Subjects’ normative beliefs suggest that an imbalance of perceived responsibility may explain the asymmetry between sellers’ and buyers’ cooperative tendencies and responsiveness to informational remedies.

主讲人简介：宋哲炜，u8国际经济学系讲师。研究领域为行为与实验经济学、信息经济学、产业组织理论等。研究成果发表于European Economic Review期刊。