No abstract

We study exclusive dealing when the incumbent may be displaced by a more efficient entrant due to the need for a firm to pay a fixed cost to remain active. We show that the incumbent can deter socially efficient entry through exclusive contracts under the one-buyer-one-supplier framework. This result continues to hold in the presence of product differentiation, in which case exclusion is more likely to occur when the efficiency gap between the entrant and the incumbent falls into an intermediate range.

It is well known in the credence‐good literature that in an expert‐client relationship, under the Liability assumptions, clients have to reject the expert’s serious‐treatment recommendations with a positive probability to ensure that the expert honestly recommends treatments. Inefficiency arises because some socially efficient treatments are not provided. We show that the expert can enhance clients’ trust, or acceptance rate of the serious treatment, by providing intrinsically socially inefficient customer service upon recommending the serious treatment. Enhanced clients’ trust leads to higher efficiency and higher profit for the expert. However, trust cannot be enhanced by providing customer service with different timing.

We study trust building in credence-goods markets in a dynamic setting. When consumers’ expected loss is low and it is efficient to fix only the more severe problem, there is no trade in the one-shot game. In the repeated game, an expert’s honesty is monitored through consumers’ rejection of his recommendations. The expert’s profit in the optimal equilibrium weakly increases in the discount factor but does not achieve the first best, which contrasts sharply with the optimal equilibrium in experience-goods markets. The optimal equilibrium involves undertreatment if the expert is sufficiently patient, and overtreatment if he is moderately patient. (JEL C73, D82, D83, Z13)