This past summer, I drove to Mt. Rainier to visit my sister who was working at the gift shop there.\u00a0 Outside of Puyallup, WA my car wouldn’t start.\u00a0 I took it to Sears and they informed me that I had a bad starter.\u00a0 They replaced the starter. It still wouldn’t start. Two days, an alternator, and battery later I was back on the road.<\/p>\n
My Explorer made it 1500 miles across the country to my university before running into more problems.\u00a0 The first mechanic I took it to told me that I needed to replace both of my tie rods, my upper left ball joint, my front brakes and then get an alignment.\u00a0 The estimate came to over 600 dollars.\u00a0 I balked at the price.\u00a0 A fellow graduate student recommended another mechanic who charged less for parts and fixed my Explorer for less than 250 dollars.<\/p>\n
I am pretty ignorant when it comes to cars.\u00a0 I can change my oil, replace a flat and that’s about it.\u00a0 If you’re like me, you’ve probably had experience with mechanics using asymmetric information to maximize their utility.\u00a0 But how widespread is the problem?\u00a0 As a graduate student, Henry Schneider, decided to find out.<\/a>\u00a0 He disconnected the battery cable and drained some coolant from his Suburu before taking it to 40 different garages.<\/p>\n “Ten of the garages, meanwhile, recommended costly repairs that were plainly unnecessary, like replacing the starter motor or the battery.”<\/em><\/p>\n It looks like I’m not the only one out there replacing perfectly good starters.\u00a0 The cost is sunk, but its nice to know that I’m not alone in my naivety.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This past summer, I drove to Mt. Rainier to visit my sister who was working at the gift shop there.\u00a0 Outside of Puyallup, WA my car wouldn’t start.\u00a0 I took it to Sears and they informed me that I had a bad starter.\u00a0 They replaced the starter. It still wouldn’t start. Two days, an alternator, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/aspiringeconomist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/aspiringeconomist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/aspiringeconomist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/aspiringeconomist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/aspiringeconomist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/aspiringeconomist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/aspiringeconomist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/aspiringeconomist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/aspiringeconomist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}