Nelson (1970, 1974) proposes a classification of search and experience goods based on consumers’ ability to discover product quality before purchase.
Although Nelson assumes that experience leads to certainty about product quality for
experience goods, others argue that experience often provides ambiguous information, and thus consumers may remain uncertain about product quality even after gaining experience (Ha and Hoch 1989; Hoch and Deighton 1989;Hoch and Ha 1986).
Notwithstanding extensions (Darby and Karni 1973) and qualifications (Alba et al. 1997; Hoch
and Deighton 1989; Wright and Lynch 1995), the experience versus search good classification remains widely accepted in the marketing literature (Klein 1998).