研讨论文

《Signaling to the Naive and the Pessimistic: from Separation to Warranty Collapse

主讲人

张肆祐 （中央财经大学中国经济与管理研究院本科生）

内容简介

This paper examines how sellers signal product quality through warranties and prices when buyers systematically misperceive their own future time-inconsistent behavior. We develop a two-stage signaling game in which firms with private quality compete via price–warranty contracts framed as bids in a first-price auction, while buyer beliefs range from pessimism to naivety. Buyer misperception creates a wedge between the perceived value of warranty coverage and its true expected cost, giving rise to a non-monotonic equilibrium structure that collapses under sufficiently extreme beliefs. On the pessimistic side, warranty provision inflates monotonically as misperception deepens. Within the separating region, the model generates a reversal of the conventional signaling hierarchy: a lower-quality firm optimally offers a stronger warranty signal and charges a higher price than its higher-quality rival. This outcome arises because the low-type firm faces a higher marginal cost of signaling and must therefore target buyers with higher willingness to pay in order to absorb excessive warranty costs through price. The reversal result holds robustly under both monopoly and duopoly competition. Overall, the analysis shows how buyer misperception can distort market segmentation, reverse standard signaling predictions, and ultimately undermine the informativeness of warranty signals.

点评老师

张志祥、尹训东

时间

12月29日 (14:00-15:30）

地址

学术会堂712

活动对象

创新发展学院学生

人数规模

30人

主办单位

创新发展学院

撰稿：张肆祐

审稿：尹训东

编辑：沈嘉怡

审核：林艺茹