Abstract
One day several years ago, Mike Wolfe, in an episode of his hit cable TV show American Pickers, pulled his Mercedes-Benz van up to a rural property that looked particularly promising: out front were several beat-up old pickup trucks bearing “For Sale” signs, and scattered farther back stood more than a dozen trailers.1 Accompanied by his “picking” partner, Frank Fritz, Wolfe was in upstate New York, somewhere between Saratoga Springs and Syracuse, far from Wolfe’s home base of Eau Claire, Iowa.
THE ROLE: Sellers often know more about the quality of what they’re offering than buyers do, making buyers wary of the goods on offer. By scouting for what buyers want, screening the options, and staking their own reputations on what they buy and sell, Certifiers provide value for both buyers and sellers. To profit from this role, Certifiers must invest in their ability to tell the wheat from the chaff and in a reputation for quality that pays off in the long run.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Libby Callaway with Mike Wolfe, Frank Fritz, and Danielle Colby, American Pickers Guide to Picking (New York: Hyperion, 2011), 11.
Decision scientists call this a sequential-search problem, the classic version of which is the secretary problem: candidates must be seen one at a time, and must be either accepted or rejected with no going back. The challenge is to find the optimal stopping rule. See, for example, Thomas S. Ferguson, “Who Solved the Secretary Problem?” Statistical Science 4, no. 3 (August 1989): 282–89.
Paul Resnick, Richard Zeckhauser, John Swanson, and Kate Lockwood, “Ehe Value of Reputation on eBay: A Controlled Experiment,” Experimental Economics9, no. 2 (2006): 79–101.
Nira Yacouel and Aliza Fleischer, “The Role of Cybermediaries in Reputation Building and Price Premiums in the Online Hotel Market,” Journal of Travel Research 51, no. 2 (2012): 219–26.
Michael Anderson and Jeremy Magruder, “Learning from the Crowd: Regression Discontinuity Estimates of the Effects of an Online Review Database,” The Economic Journal 122, no. 563 (September 2012): 957–89.
Investing in a storefront is one of several ways sellers can elicit trust among buyers. See Patricia M. Doney and Joseph P. Cannon, “An Examination of the Nature of Trust in Buyer-Seller Relationships,” Journal of Marketing 61, no. 2 (April 1997): 35–51.
George A. Akerlof, “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 84, no. 3 (August 1970): 488–500.
Richard Whately, quoted in Richard S. Howey, The Rise of the Marginal Utility School, 1870–1889 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 4.
Richard Whately, Introductory Lectures on Political Economy (London: B. Fellowes, 1831), 253.
Copyright information
© 2015 Marina Krakovsky
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Krakovsky, M. (2015). The Certifier. In: The Middleman Economy. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-53020-2_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-53020-2_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-57655-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-53020-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave Social Sciences CollectionSocial Sciences (R0)