Complementarity in Reputation Building. The authors show
that under certain conditions, co-branding that links
unknown firms in a new sector with established firms in
a mature sector allows the unknown firms to signal a
high product quality and establish their own reputation.
They compare this situation with a benchmark in which
both sectors are new and firms signal their quality only
with prices. They investigate how this comparison is
affected by the nature of the technology linking the two
sectors and a cross-sector inference problem that
consumers might face in identifying the true cause of
product failure. 2007. Site with abstract - pdf-file
available for download
