Marketing Science and Social Welfare
CATONSVILLE, MD, August 25, 2014 —For “credence services” such as auto-repair, healthcare, and legal services, the benefit to the customers for the service is difficult to assess before and even after the service. A new study in a journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) finds that in a credence services market, when more service providers care about the customer’s wellbeing, society as whole may actually be worse off.