Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
Cited by 2,144

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 4 of the 4 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

No Pain, No Gain: A Critical Review of the Literature on Signaling Unobservable Product Quality

Kirmani, Amna, Rao, Akshay R.·2000·Journal of Marketing

Abstract

Recent research in information economics has focused on signals as mechanisms to solve problems that arise under asymmetric information. A firm or individual credibly communicates the level of some unobservable element in a transaction by providing an observable signal. When applied to conveying product quality information, this issue is of particular interest to the discipline of marketing. In this article, the authors focus on the ways a firm may signal the unobservable quality of its products through several marketing-mix variables. The authors develop a typology that classifies signals and discuss the available empirical evidence on the signaling properties of several marketing variables. They consider managerial implications of signaling and outline an agenda for future empirical research.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1509/jmkg.64.2.66.18000

Cites

4 of 4 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 4 references

Research works printed but not linked: 61

  1. 10.1086/208929 · DOI
  2. 10.2307/2555397 · DOI
  3. Bagwell Kyle, 1991, American Economic Review, 81, 224
  4. 10.1177/002224299205600301 · DOI · Paper page
  5. Bettman James R., 1979, An Information Processing Theory of Consumer Choice.
  6. 10.2307/1885346 · DOI · Paper page
  7. 10.1086/209337 · DOI · Paper page
  8. 10.1016/0167-7187(95)00478-5 · DOI
  9. 10.2307/1885060 · DOI · Paper page
  10. 10.1287/mksc.11.4.327 · DOI
  11. 10.1287/mksc.13.2.177 · DOI
  12. 10.2307/2555592 · DOI · Paper page
  13. Davis Scott, 1997, “Accounting for Consumer Expectations in the Choice of Price and Quality,”
  14. 10.1023/A:1007963128115 · DOI
  15. 10.1177/002224379803500305 · DOI · Paper page
  16. 10.1207/s15327663jcp0702_02 · DOI · Paper page
  17. 10.1177/002224378502200210 · DOI · Paper page
  18. 10.1086/466995 · DOI · Paper page
  19. 10.1177/002224299405800306 · DOI
  20. 10.2307/2555760 · DOI
  21. 10.1086/296482 · DOI
  22. 10.1177/009207038801600211 · DOI
  23. 10.1086/261235 · DOI · Paper page
  24. 10.1086/208546 · DOI · Paper page
  25. 10.1080/00913367.1997.10673530 · DOI · Paper page
  26. 10.1086/209220 · DOI · Paper page
  27. 10.1515/9780691215747 · DOI · Paper page
  28. 10.1287/mksc.16.2.112 · DOI
  29. 10.2307/2555691 · DOI · Paper page
  30. 10.1287/mksc.14.4.417 · DOI
  31. 10.1086/261408 · DOI · Paper page
  32. 10.1177/002224379803500301 · DOI · Paper page
  33. 10.1016/0167-7187(90)90029-Z · DOI
  34. 10.1086/296556 · DOI
  35. 10.1086/260231 · DOI · Paper page
  36. Padmanabhan V., 1995, Sloan Management Review, 37, 65
  37. 10.1086/209377 · DOI
  38. 10.1177/002224298304700204 · DOI · Paper page
  39. 10.2307/795882 · DOI
  40. Rao Akshay R., 1993, Pricing Strategy & Practice: An International Journal, 1, 4
  41. 10.1086/209311 · DOI
  42. Rao Akshay R., 2000, Harvard Business Review, 78
  43. Rao Akshay R., 2000, “The Price of Launching a New Product: Empirical Evidence on the Use of Slotting Allowances,”
  44. 10.1086/209162 · DOI · Paper page
  45. 10.1177/002224378902600309 · DOI · Paper page
  46. 10.1086/209703 · DOI
  47. 10.1177/002224379903600209 · DOI · Paper page
  48. 10.1177/002224299706100403 · DOI · Paper page
  49. 10.1111/j.1745-6606.1976.tb00570.x · DOI
  50. 10.2307/1885326 · DOI · Paper page
  51. 10.1086/260683 · DOI · Paper page
  52. 10.2307/2601011 · DOI
  53. 10.2307/1882010 · DOI · Paper page
  54. 10.2307/2296908 · DOI · Paper page
  55. 10.1177/002224379603300405 · DOI · Paper page
  56. 10.1086/467380 · DOI
  57. 10.1287/mksc.6.3.240 · DOI · Paper page
  58. Tirole Jean, 1989, The Theory of Industrial Organization.
  59. 10.2307/2555667 · DOI · Paper page
  60. 10.1086/208513 · DOI
  61. 10.2307/2297767 · DOI · Paper page

Cited by

See all 2,144

Metadata

Authors
Kirmani, A., & Rao, A. R.
Venue
Journal of Marketing
Published
2000-04
Volume
64
Issue
2
Pages
66-79
ISSN
  • 0022-2429 (ISSN-L)
  • 1547-7185
OpenAlex
W2179200719
Cited by
2,144
References
4
FWCI
60.13
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Licence
journals.sagepub.com/page/policies/text-and-data-mining-license (tdm)

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: No Pain, No Gain: A Critical Review of the Literature on Signaling Unobservable Product Quality. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1509/jmkg.64.2.66.18000
The paper
Kirmani, A., & Rao, A. R. (2000). No Pain, No Gain: A Critical Review of the Literature on Signaling Unobservable Product Quality. Journal of Marketing. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkg.64.2.66.18000

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.