We investigate the formation of market prices in a new experimental setting involving multi-period call-auction asset markets with state-dependent fundamentals. We are particularly interested in two informational aspects: (1) the role of traders who are informed about the true state and/or (2)...

We analyze optimal trading mechanisms in environments where each trader owns some units of a good to be traded and may be either a seller or a buyer, depending on the realization of privately observed valuations. First, the concept of virtual valuation is extended to ex ante unidentified...

Our objective in this paper is to illustrate and better understand the unavoidable arbitrage between incentives and flexibility in contexts of asymmetric information and to characterize the general features of an appropriate response to this challenge. We show that procedures and institutions in...

This paper studies the implications of non-commitment for organizational design. An organizational form must trade-off between the coordination benefits associated with the centralization of information and its associated costs in terms of renegotiation. This analysis makes precise what these...

Suppose an entrepreneur needs funds from a financier to invest in a risky project whose cost is fixed, and whose return may be high or low. Suppose also that the project's realized return is an information that is private to the entrepreneur. If the amount the entrepreneur pays back to the...

The recent automobile liability insurance crisis in Atlantic Canada has prompted the four provincial legislations (Newfoundland and Labrador, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island) to setup a task force to redesign, if necessary, the personal automobile insurance system. After...

We show that information asymmetry may not cause any distortion in product differentiation. This contrasts with the main result of the literature on signaling which stresses that information asymmetry has a non negligible impact on strategic behavior. A thorough analysis of the...

Two firms produce a good with a horizontal and a vertical characteristic called quality. The difference in the unobservable quality levels determines how the firms share the market. We consider two scenarios: In the first one, firms disclose quality; in the second one, they send costly signals...

We provide an experimental analysis of competitive insurance markets with adverse selection. Our parameterized version of the lemons' model (Akerlof 1970) in the insurance context predicts total crowding out of low-risks when insurers offer a single full insurance contract. The therapy proposed...

The paper addresses the effect of technological progress on the frontiers of the firm, building on transaction cost theory and agency theory. The model incorporates four types of costs: production, coordination, management, and transaction costs. The market has lower production costs, but higher...