Private Information in Markets: A Market Design Perspective

This paper studies the impact of heterogeneity in interdependence of trader values on price inference and welfare. A model of double auction with quasilinear-quadratic utilities is introduced that allows for arbitrary Gaussian information structures. With heterogeneous interdependence, some traders learn more from prices whereas others from private signals; thus, heterogeneity separates informed and uninformed trading. Changes in market structure can improve both informativeness of prices and private signals of a trader and make some traders learn more from prices than others. We characterize conditions on the information structure for price and signal inference to involve no tradeoff.