| According to the information asymmetry degree between the buyer and the seller,Darby & Karni(1973)classifies the goods into three categories: search goods,experience goods,and credence goods.Among them,the search goods refer to the products whose information asymmetry is not serious such that customers can identify the products' quality before purchasing,such as clothing,furniture,etc.The experience goods refer to the products whose information asymmetry is a little serious such that customers can only identify its quality after using it for a while,such as cars,the taste of the restaurant,etc.The credence goods refer to the products whose information asymmetry is very serious such that customer can not identify the quality even after using it for a long time,such as expert service like medical treatment,legal consultation,financial service,and the safety of food and medicine.In recent days,with the technology development,the information asymmetry of the product become more and more serious,which makes more and more product become credence goods.As a result,it is of great importance to have a deep understanding on these industries.In particular,the industries for the credence goods are still at the early stage of development in China,and the legal systems are still not perfect.Particularly,the expert service market represented by medical service market and the product market represented by the food safety face various challenges,such as conflicts between doctors and patients,overtreatment,food safety incidents and the long-term distrust of the native milk power producers etc.Therefore,the study on the development of the industries for the credence goods has important practical significance.Due to the characteristics of the credence goods,it is difficult for the consumers to know the quality of the purchased product or service.Under this situation,the collective reputation of the industry or the brand becomes an important criterion.The effect is very common in the dairy industry in China after the melamine incident in 2008.However,there is relatively little research on the role of collective reputation in the industries for the credence goods.Therefore,this article will take medical service market and food market as two examples to explore the role and influence mechanism of collective reputation on the development of the credence goods industries,and try to provide theoretical analysis and policy recommendations for the development of China's credence goods industries.Firstly,by constructing a dynamic game theory model including doctors and patients,the paper takes medical service market as an example to explore the influence of public opinion on doctor-patient relationship,and how the collective reputation affects the equilibrium of this market.As doctors have advantages of both information and technique in the process of providing medical services,so in the event of medical conflict,the media and public often blame doctors in the view of"presumption of guilt",hoping to protect patients and prevent moral hazard of the doctor.This paper focuses on the doctor-patient conflicts from the perspective of collective reputation and finds that presumption of guilt is an important cause of the rise of the doctor-patient conflicts.Specifically,this paper shows that due to the unobservability and uncertainty of medical service,the collective reputation of the doctors is a necessary premise that patient trusts doctor.Under the environment of“presumption of guilt”,the collective reputation and credibility of the doctors are highly susceptible to "stigmatized" comments,resulting in more and more patients lose faith in the doctor,and therefore,doctor-patient conflict caused by the lack of trust is inevitable.More seriously,as the doctor-patient conflicts intensified,and the presumption of guilt becoomes rigid thinking,doctors have to rely on defensive treatment,like iver check,for self-protection,which further causes the decrease of the collective reputation of doctors.Finally,medical market would be trapped into the bad equilibrium where doctors' collective reputation drops,and both patients and doctors distrust and guard against each other.Policy implications of the paper are that the key to relieve doctor-patient conflicts is to enhance the government's credibility in the process of settling medical disputes.Only when both patients and doctors believe that their rights are well protected can medical market form the winwin equilibrium where patients "dare to” trust doctors,and doctors "are able to"focus on serving patients,and the public welfare in the medical profession can give full play.Secondly,taking food safety as an example,this paper starts from the perspective of enterprises,and examines the role of the proactive recall system in maintaining the collective reputation of the food industry by establishing an infinite dynamic game theory model.The study found that maintaining a good reputation for food companies requires not only a sophisticated beforehand preventing mechanism,but also effective remedies.Because foods have the property of“credence goods”,it's difficult for consumers and even producers to observe their quality.Therefore,even companies that produce in good faith will inevitably make mistakes and produce unqualified products.The lack of effective remedies for products is an important reason for China's food crisis.This paper shows that,proactively recalling unqualified products can compensate for production risks timely,and firms can send the signals of a high-quality production.That can help them regain the consumers' trust.Although the voluntary recall makes the company suffer losses in the current period,it helps firm maintain the image of the company in the long run,enhance the collective reputation of the industry,and thus increase the company's revenue.The policy implication of this paper is that pre-existing prevention needs to cooperate with the remedial mechanism afterwards to maintain the integrity production of food enterprises,thereby breaking the crisis of industry trust and realizing the breakout of domestic brands.Therefore,the establishment of a sound recall mechanism is of vital importance to China's food industry.Lastly,this paper takes the trust crisis of food industry as an example,and builds a game theory model including domestic credence goods manufacturers,consumers and the blockchain platforms,and examines the feasibility of current booming blockchain technology to break the trust crisis of China's credence goods industry.The study finds that due to the decentralization,anti-tampering attributes,and autonomy,smart contracts generated by the blockchain technology can help high-quality product manufacturers send credible signals for its low implement costs,thus distinguishing them from manufacturers that produce low-quality products,which can promote manufacturers that produce high-quality products to enter the market and raise the proportion of high-quality products in the market.Therefore,this can gradually improve the collective reputation of the industry,and break the trust crisis of the industry.The study further shows that,it's correlated between the space in which the blockchain technology works and the validity of the consensus formed by the smart contract,the consumer's estimate of the consensus formed by the smart contract and the consumer's privacy cost to the blockchain technology.When the effectiveness of the blockchain reaches a certain level,and the trust for consumers of the blockchain technology reaches a certain level,the blockchain technology can effectively play its role.The main novelties of this paper are as follows.First,this paper can provide a new perspective for the cause,mechanism and governance of the trust crisis in the credence goods industry.At present,there are few theoretical and empirical literature on the trust crisis in the credence goods industry from the perspective of collective reputation.For example,regarding the conflicts between doctors and patients,most of the existing literature start from the doctor's salary system,and examine how doctors' wage control and "medication by medicine" lead to "difficulty in seeing a doctor and the expensive medical treatment",which in turn enhance tensions between doctors and patients,and the conflicts between doctors and patients.However,the above angles are difficult to provide a satisfactory explanation for the current dilemma of deteriorating doctor-patient relationship.This article provides an explanation for the fierce conflicts between doctors and patients from the perspective of collective reputation.Regarding the literature on the trust of food industry,current studies mostly propose countermeasures from the perspective of supervision to resolve the trust crisis in China's food industry,and little literature find solutions from the perspective of enterprises.At the same time,most of the existing literature focuses on the study of preventive measures before the crisis,but lacks the exploration of remedies after the event.In this context,this paper starts from the perspective of enterprises,and conducts research on the trust crisis in the food industry in terms of pre-existing prevention and ex-post remedy.It is a supplement to relevant literature.Starting from the blockchain technology,this paper systematically explores the possible applications,scope of use and impact mechanism of blockchain technology in China's credence goods industry,and conducts in-depth analysis of relevant factors that may affect its effects.As far as we know,this is also the first trial in the literature.Second,this article has made an important expansion of the collective reputation theory.The collective reputation theory was formally proposed by Tirole(1996)and has been widely investigated in research fields such as industrial organizations since then.However,most of the existing collective reputation literature only considers the information asymmetry factor,and few study has considered other factors.Against this backdrop,we extend the collective reputation theory in two aspects.Firstly,in the third chapter,this paper innovatively introduces the uncertainty factor into the theoretical framework of collective reputation.To the best of our knowledge,this paper should be among the first in the similar literature to examine the issue of collective reputation in the context of information asymmetry and uncertainty,and also apply this theory to the prominent social phenomenon of doctor-patient conflicts.In addition,the existing collective reputation research often only considers how the collective reputation of the agent affects the decision of the principle.This paper further examines how the collective reputation of the principles(patients)affect the decision of the agents(doctors).Expanding the “unilateral” collective reputation in the existing literature into a“bilateral” collective reputation is an important extension of the collective reputation theory.Secondly,in the fourth chapter,the paper introduces the production risk to extend the collective reputation theory,which provides a new theoretical framework for the study of food safety.Based on the actual situation,this paper extends Tirole's(1996)collective reputation model,and introduces the assumption that the company has production risks(integrity companies may also make mistakes)based on the original model,which is closer to reality.Third,this paper provides feasible policy recommendations for the development and regulation of China's credence goods industry.In view of the medical market,this paper believes that the regulatory authorities should take the promotion of the credibility for supervision as a path to manage the conflict between doctors and patients.On the one hand,media reports which are "maliciously wounded" doctor reputation should be regulated to prevent the collective reputation of doctors from being damaged by one-sided reports;on the other hand,the use of guilty presumed medical accountability should be reduced,and the punishment for doctors who are dereliction of duty should be increased(in case there is sufficient evidence to prove that the doctor is indeed dereliction of duty).Therefore,the entire doctor community believes that their rights and reputation can be fairly maintained,and this also allows the patient group to believe that their legitimate rights and interests can be effectively guaranteed.For the market represented by food and medicine,this paper proposes that it is difficult to maintain the collective reputation of the industry by relying on prevention beforehand(reducing production risk),and it is necessary to cooperate with the perfect remediation mechanism to effectively maintain the collective reputation of the credence goods industry in China.The proactive recall mechanism has been proved to be an effective method in developed countries.Meanwhile,blockchain technology is conducive to the dissolution of the trust crisis in the credence goods industry,its effectiveness depends on some corresponding conditions,such as the validity of the consensus reached in the smart contract signed in the blockchain system,the degree of consumers' trust for the effectiveness of consensus which are achieved by the smart contract,and the consumers' concerns about personal privacy concern.Therefore,the key for the blockchain technology to breaking the crisis of the credence goods industry includes strengthening the security monitoring of the blockchain system,ensuring the effectiveness of smart contracts,preventing hacker attacks,and ensuring the security of users' information and properties. |
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