Summary
The market for ratings suffers from several inefficiencies: asymmetric information and moral hazard lead to conflicts of interest and principal-agent-problems. Moreover, network externalities and economies of scale lead to a lack of competition in the market for ratings. There is empirical evidence for market inefficiencies as ratingshopping, herding or slow adjustment of wrong ratings to a changed environment. As a remedy for these problems, we suggest a fund where rating-orders are pooled and rated by means of a double-blind-approach. Each issuer of a security gives his product into a pool and rating agencies which meet the standards of the pool are free to tender for the mandate to rate the product. Several aspects how to set up such a pool and possible problems are being addressed in this paper.
© 2010 by Lucius & Lucius, Stuttgart
