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Website Development as a Credence Good: A Field Experiment
Appelt, Šimon ; Chytilová, Julie (advisor) ; Špolcová, Dominika (referee)
There are many markets for credence goods which have been assessed in recent economic research, including taxi services, car mechanics, health care or electronics repairs. How- ever, as no previous research inspects solely an Internet-based environment, the thesis examines the web development market as the representative of a new potential segment of markets for credence goods. In particular, the discrimination in overcharging based on gender or technical experience of a customer is assessed. For this reason, a natural field experiment was designed and subsequently, 341 Czech web developers and IT firms were approached via email to collect the proposed prices for a fictitious E-shop development contract. After the analysis of the outcome variables, the multiple linear regression model with the ordinary least squares (OLS) method was employed. The results suggest that male customers tend to get higher price proposals than women. The second implication is that customers who signalled technical experience in the email inquiry appear to get higher prices than the non-technical customers. However, the outcomes and the differ- ences in proposed prices were not significant among the treatment groups. Other factors, including the number of employees, the region where the company resides and proposed...
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