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Moreover, as argued by Liebie (2002), when producers of low-quality products claim to be of high-quality, this would raise doubt in consumer's mind and would not be willing to pay a premium for the high-quality goods. This in turns, would lower the profits of high-quality producer hence reducing their incentive to invest in high-quality products, in which would create further doubt to consumer. The cycle goes on until only low-quality products would be sold, even though consumers prefer high-quality products, resulting market failure.

Darby and Karni (1973) suggested that the amount of fraud depends on reputation, market conditions, and technological factors. Profit-maximising producers would have the incentive to fraud by claiming their products are of high quality if the probability of not being caught is high enough (McCluskey, 2000) or conversely if the probability of being caught is low. Such fraud issues bring uncertainty to consumers.

3.3.1B. Problems of Uncertainty

Bonroy and Constantos (2008) concluded that uncertainty by consumers on the identity of producers which produce the high-quality products put the high-quality producers in disadvantage resulting from higher cost. They argued that this disadvantage would remain even when the consumption of high-quality products benefits are well worth the cost difference and all beliefs regarding the high-quality producers are in the right direction (ibid.). Their model explains the difficulty faced by high-quality credence products to acquire the dominant market share they should have obtained from efficiency perspective (ibid.). This is however beyond the concept of this paper, as to avoid complication in the model, it is assumed that producers behave honestly in producing the products and consumers fully aware the qualities.

3.3.1C. Non-Rational Behaviour

Unavailability of credible food quality labelling, consumers would face uncertainty and would incur search cost on specific information (Hobbs, 2004, in Verbeke 2005). As a result some consumers would not behave rationally, being ignorant, or make decisions which are not maximising their expected utility. Such behaviour explained as a concept of “bounded and limited rationality” or “rationally ignorant consumer hypothesis” (as found in Kahneman and Tversky, 1973; Simon 1979a,b; Camerer and Loewenstein, 2004; in Verbeke 2005), is however beyond the concept of the study in this paper. Verbeke (2005) concluded that without quality verification, traceability was of little value to consumers, whereas quality assurances were much more valuable to them. The solutions to the problems of market failure are presented in the next section.

3.4. Solutions to the Problems

This section examines some of the solutions to the problems mentioned previously which are mainly caused by lack of information. The most common solution this, as stated earlier, is providing more information through labelling or signalling. But this must be accompanied with efficient monitoring.

3.4.1. The Use of Labelling as a Signal

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