Examines the productivity performance of the wholesale and retail trade sectors in light of their significant … contribution to Australia’s record productivity performance in the 1990s. Fundamental changes in the nature and operations of … wholesale trade, in particular, have brought marked improvements in productivity performance over the 1990s. The paper examines …

between buyers and sellers, such as found in Akerlof’s lemons model and Spence’s signaling model and extends the arguments put … all qualities together (lemons) or using external indications of quality to separate them (signaling). Similarly, the …

whether it is because of poor or smart operations. We hypothesize that inventory has a signaling role. In our model, publicly … the assumptions behind this inventory signaling hypothesis: (1) the market cannot tell the difference between “good” and …

, free trade may be optimal even under the assumption of symmetric information. Due to costly signaling, this result is …