IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/uea/wcbess/25-02.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Adaptive Skepticism in the Face of Uncertainty: An Experimental Study on Verifiable Information Disclosure

Author

Listed:
  • Christian Koch

    (Department of Economics, University of Vienna)

  • Stefan P. Penczynski

    (School of Economics and Centre for Behavioural and Experimental Social Science, University of East Anglia)

  • Sihong Zhang

    (McKinsey & Company, Inc.)

Abstract

When sellers disclose verifiable information, buyers must exercise sufficient skepticism to account for potentially selective disclosure, yet previous evidence suggests they often fail to do so. We experimentally examine how buyers adapt their skepticism in response to uncertainty about the pool of available verifiable information. Contrary to previous findings on institutional manipulations in the literature, we discover that buyers adapt to our institutional change quite effectively, even—if anything—enhancing their skepticism. These results suggest that buyers’ skepticism may adjust appropriately, or not, depending on the specific context, implying that consumer naivety may be less frequent, at least when real-world features prompt scrutiny.

Suggested Citation

  • Christian Koch & Stefan P. Penczynski & Sihong Zhang, 2025. "Adaptive Skepticism in the Face of Uncertainty: An Experimental Study on Verifiable Information Disclosure," Working Paper series, University of East Anglia, Centre for Behavioural and Experimental Social Science (CBESS) 25-02, School of Economics, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK..
  • Handle: RePEc:uea:wcbess:25-02
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://ueaeco.github.io/working-papers/papers/cbess/UEA-CBESS-25-02.pdf
    File Function: main text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Disclosure; verifiable information; competition; Peltzman effect;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D40 - Microeconomics - - Market Structure, Pricing, and Design - - - General
    • D83 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief; Unawareness

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:uea:wcbess:25-02. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Cara Liggins (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/esueauk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.