In recent work for the European Commission, myself and colleagues have been evaluating competition in the professional business services markets with the aim of identifying which aspects of the sector inhibit effective competition. In this article I will explain a bit about our findings and highlight the different competition concerns and how economic theory is interwoven into this analysis.

Background

Firstly, what are professional business services (or PBS for short)? For this study they included accounting, legal, architectural and engineering services. These services are typically known as credence goods, in the sense that consumers often don’t know about expected service quality before they purchase the service and are unlikely to be able to evaluate quality after provision. [...]