No abstract

The existing literature in expert-customer relationship concludes that when: i) consumers are homogenous, ii) consumers are committed with an expert once this one makes a recommendation, and iii) the type of treatment provided is verifiable, an expert finds optimal to serve efficiently his customers. This work shows that the previous result may not occur when consumers are not risk-neutral. Our result, that holds in a monopoly setting and under Bertrand competition, suggests that risk averse consumers are more likely to be mistreated by experts.

International audienceThis paper contributes to the economic analysis of merger control by taking into account the efficiency gains for the design of structural merger remedies when the competition authorities do not observe the magnitude of efficiency gains. We show that whenever divestitures are necessary, the Competition Authority will need to extract from the merging partners their private information on the merger's efficiency gains. For this we propose a revelation mechanism combining divestitures with two additional tools, the regulation of the divestitures sale price and a merger fee. We show that an optimal combination of both instruments is effective: the most efficient merged firms are to pay a merger fee while the less efficient divest assets at an upwards distorted sale price