Collaborative Research: The Effects of Information on Firm Conduct and Market Structure

经济学中有一部重要的理论文献，它确定了向消费者提供更多信息可能导致市场效率提高的各种方式，特别是消费者的福利。这些理论见解为政府寻求增加消费者可获得的信息量的政策提供了基础。这些政策的例子包括食品标签法、会计披露规则和家用电器能效标签。同时，现有的关于信息对消费者对企业行为的影响的实证研究发现，这些影响很小或可以忽略不计，这让人对此类政策的重要性产生了怀疑。在这个项目中，我们分析了一个监管变化，它为评估产品信息增加对公司产品质量选择和披露决策的影响提供了一个有吸引力的背景。1998年，洛杉矶县引入了卫生质量等级卡，在餐馆的橱窗里展示。这一监管变化提供了一个实验，即公司是否需要接受(卫生质量)非可核实的正式披露、自愿披露和可核实的披露，还是强制披露。我们的研究表明，信息的增加对餐厅卫生质量有实质性的影响。我们还发现，强制性披露的效果与自愿可验证披露的效果非常相似。这一发现的一个可能的含义是，强制披露法律(由于行业团体的游说可能很难引入)不如让政府为公司自愿披露可验证的产品信息提供机制/程序那么重要。我们丰富的数据集使我们能够分析不同餐厅等级卡的影响如何不同。这很有趣，因为我们可以解决在现有经验文献中很少或没有受到关注的问题，例如：(I)声誉是否有助于公司克服逆向选择问题，(Ii)特许连锁餐厅是否搭乘连锁声誉的便车，以及(Iii)增加的产品信息对公司的盈利能力和市场结构有何影响？

There is a significant theoretical literature in economics that identifies various ways throughwhich providing more information to consumers may lead to improvements in market effciencyand consumer welfare in particular. The theoretical insights provide a basis for governmentpolicies that seek to increase the amount of information available to consumers. Examples ofsuch policies include food labeling laws, accounting disclosure rules and energy effciency labelson home applicances. Meanwhile existing empirical studies into the effects of information toconsumers on firm behavior find small or negligible effects, casting doubt on the importance ofsuch policies. In this project, we analyze a regulatory change that provides an appealing contextfor evaluating the effects of increased product information on firms' product quality choices anddisclosure decisions.In 1998, Los Angeles County introduced hygiene quality grade cards to be displayed in restaurantwindows. The regulatory change provides an experiment in whether firms are subject to volun-tary disclosure (of hygiene quality) without verifiability, voluntary disclosure with verifiabilityor mandatory disclosure. Our research indicates substantial effects of the increased informationon restaurant hygiene quality. We also find that the effects from mandatory disclosure are verysimilar to the effects from voluntary verifiable disclosure. A possible implication of this findingis that mandatory disclosure laws (which could be hard to introduce due to lobbying by indus-try groups) are less important than having the government provide mechanisms/procedures forfirms to voluntarily disclose verifiable product information.The richness of our dataset allows us to also analyze how the effects of the grade cards differacross restaurants. This is interesting because we can address questions that have receivedlittle or no attention in the existing empirical literature, such as: (i) does reputation help firmsto overcome adverse selection problems, (ii) do franchised chain-restaurants free-ride on chainreputation, and (iii) what is the effect of the increased product information on firms' profitabilityand market structure?