Dr. Men-Andri Benz promovierte bei Prof. Dr. Egon Franck am Lehrstuhl für Unternehmensführung und -politik der Universität Zürich. Er ist bei Simon - Kucher & Partners als Strategie und Marketing Consultant tätig.

The quality and characteristics of industrial and consumption goods are often not revealed until after consumption. However, the decision to buy these products must be made before buying. Many strategies and instruments for signalling and screening have been developed in the economic world in order to overcome potential market failure due to insufficient quality detection. In many situations, efficient incentives and quality revelation are given to the market players by contracts that structure the process and payments of the transaction. Additionally, market forces lead to the emergence of new market players as intermediaries. They provide information about the quality of the products by comparing them and reveal credible signs concerning the relative quality valuation of products.Men-Andri Benz develops new pricing and positioning strategies for suppliers of such contracts goods. Using microeconomic tools as contests and incentive contracts, he analyses the basic positioning decisions for contract goods and designs concrete strategies for the specific sectors of sports and religion. The effects on pricing and profits are examined both in general and for each individual industry.

Experience and Credence Goods - An Introduction.- Experience Characteristics and Moral Hazard in Team Sports.- Credence Characteristics and Strategic Human Capital Selection.- Experience Goods, Tournaments, and Oligopolistic Markets.- Summary and Conclusions.

Foreword This book contains three essays which emanated from the desire to understand more thoroughly the strategies employed by producers of experience and credence goods in order to avoid market failure due to asymmetric information. The first essay focuses on the employment relationship between a football club and its player and treats the productivity of the latter as an experience good. The second essay looks at the market for religious services, which can be considered as credence goods per se. The analysis highlights how the church can employ specific institutional devices, like e. g. celibacy, in order to signal certain properties of its religious services to potential customers and, at the same time, gain a superior strategic position in the market for these services. The last essay is entirely devoted to the analysis of competition among suppliers of experience goods. The author employs a rather sophisticated Coumot model with endogenous, vertically differentiated products. Without going into the details here, the book is recommendable because of its creativity and originality. Scholars interested in the application areas covered by the essays as well as researchers studying markets for experience and credence goods will find rich food for thought. Prof Dr. Egon Franck Preface VII Preface Uncertainty about the quality and the attributes of a product influences the behaviour of the transaction partners and may lead to reduced market efficiency.