
Consumers are less and less concerned about the licensing status of service professionals they hire. According to new research by Stanford University economist Brad Larsen, consumers place a much higher value on customer reviews and ratings and prices. The study, conducted jointly with Ciara Farronato of Harvard, Andrey Fradkin of Boston University, and Erik Brynjolfsson of MIT, analyzed hundreds of job categories within the home improvement sector, using data covering more than a million service requests that consumers throughout the United States posted on an online market platform in 2015.
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