We study a firm investing in quality and building its reputation for quality. Quality can be certified at a cost. We consider two types of equilibria: one in which certification decisions are made based on firm’s reputation and the second in which they are made based on the time since last certification. We show that reputation-based certification has a very limited effect on incentives to inve...

Most nurses are confident in their belief that they provide excellent care; however, many find the idea of taking an examination to demonstrate their knowledge frightening. Earning a specialty certification is one of the most important accomplishments a nurse can achieve for oneself, one’s patients, and one’s employer, as it signifies knowledge and practice competency in the specialty (Oncology...

I compare the welfare effects of professional licensing and certification in Shapiro’s (1986) moral hazard model of services. Shapiro (1986) shows that licensing can dominate certification, assuming that certification reveals a provider’s human capital investment exactly. This occurs if certification leads to excessive investment in human capital as a signaling device. I consider an alternative...

Ramirez • Medical Education A managed care’s role has grown in recent years, board certification’s importance in the professional lives of physicians has grown correspondingly, as most managed care organizations require board certification for physicians participating in their plans. Hospitals increasingly are also making board certification a prerequisite to obtain staff privileges. Many physi...

Certifying agencies have begun to require a safety case as part of the product certification process. The standards upon which such certification regimes are built define properties that the safety case must have, e.g., “compelling,” and “valid”, yet leave these terms undefined. Unaided judgment of these properties leaves doubt about how approval will proceed. We introduce an operational defini...

OF THESIS THE IMPACT OF FOOD RECALL ON THIRD PARTY CERTIFICATION ADOPTION Food safety problems have gained national attention, and food recall is one of the most important indications of this concern. Third-party certifications have become a popular way to improve the safety and quality of products for consumers. Publications related to third-party certification usually focus on the motives and...

NeuroEndovascular Division, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA American Board of Radiology, Tuscon, Arizona, USA Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology and the Departments of Neurology and Neurosurgery, Washington University School of Medicine, St Louis, Missouri, USA Rhode Island Hospital, Warren Alpert School of Medicine at Brown University, Provid...

This paper studies problems of capture in certification markets. It derives conditions under which reputation enables certifiers to resist capture. Moreover, it identifies a general principle of reputation models that favors concentration. This explains certifiers as efficient market institutions that sell reputation as a service to other firms. The analysis yields the following insights: 1) A ...