The paper constructs a search-theoretic model of credit markets with a bilateral trading mechanism that enables the manageable introduction of asymmetric information. Borrowers´ success probabilities are unobservable to financiers, but the degree of risk in observable projects can be used as a...

We investigate the impact of bank competition on the use of collateral in loan contracts. We develop a theoretical model incorporating information asymmetries in a spatial competition framework where banks choose between screening the borrower and asking for collateral. We show that presence of...

We study the adverse selection problem in imperfectly competitive credit markets and illustrate the circumstances where a separating equilibrium emerges, even without collateral. The borrowers are heterogeneous in their preferences concerning the banks. Separation obtains in market segments...

The paper shows that uninformed finance gives rise to excessive entry, both in human-capital-intensive and in conventional industries when the financial institutions cannot identify the entrepreneurial talent. Introduction of informed capital (eg venture capital finance) with superior screening...

In a differential information economy with quasi–linear utilities, monetary transfers facilitate the fulfillment of incentive compatibility constraints : the associated ex ante core is generically nonempty. However, we exhibit a well–behaved exchange economy in which this core is empty, even...

In this paper we show that unlike in Bayesian frameworks asymmetric information does matter and can explain differences in common knowledge decisions due to ambiguous character of agents' private information. Agents share a common-but-not-necessarily-additive prior beliefs represented by...

The motivation of this paper comes from repeated games with incomplete information and imperfect monitoring. It concerns the existence, for any payoff function, of a particular equilibrium (called completely revealing) allowing each player to learn the state of nature. We consider thus an...

We identify particular exchange economies with asymmetric information in which the ex ante incentive compatible core is nonempty provided that coalitions can allocate goods by means of random mechanisms. Both the use of random mechanisms and the restriction to a specific class of economies are...

This article models a situation in which a monopolistic insurer evaluates risk better than its customers. The resulting equilibrium allocations are compared to the consequences of the standard adverse selection hypothesis. On the positive side, they exhibit the property that low-risk people are...

We study information transmission between informed experts and an uninformed decision-maker who only takes binary decisions. In the single expert case, we show that information transmission can only be relatively poor. Hence, even sophiscated communication games do not yield equilibria which (ex...