Does price-guarantees positively affect the disclosure of information about products?

What is it about?

Price-guarantees (such as price matching or price beating) are commonly used in many retail markets across the world. For this guarantees to have meaning it is necessary that buyers have enough information about the products to make a useful comparison of their prices. In this paper I address the question of how the adoption of these price guarantees affects the sellers' 'incentives to provide sellers with more information about their products.

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Why is it important?

The paper shows that indeed, what we should expect to see is more transparent information about the attributes of products in markets where sellers have the option to adopt price-guarantees. This is important because it suggests that competition together with price-guarantees have a positive effect in the disclosure of information about the attributes of the products.