Do asset prices aggregate investors’ private information about the ability of financial analysts? We show that as financial analysts become reputable, the market can get trapped: Investors optimally choose to ignore their private information, and blindly follow analyst recommendations. As time...

We use a simple, graphical moral hazard model to compare monitored bank lending versus non-monitored bond issues as sources of external funds for industry. We contrast the conditions that theoretically favor each system, such as the size and number of firms, with conditions prevailing when these...

We introduce and justify a taxonomy for the structure of markets and minimal institutions which appear in constructing minimally complex trading structures to perform the functions of price formation, settlement and payments. Each structure is presented as a playable strategic market game and is...

In order to explain in a systematic way why certain combinations of market, financial, and legal structures may be intrinsic to certain capabilities to exchange real goods, we introduce criteria for abstracting the qualitative functions of markets. The criteria involve the number of strategic...

We study a dynamic buyer-seller problem in which the good is information and there are no property rights. The potential buyer is reluctant to pay for information whose value to him is uncertain, but the seller cannot credibly convey its value to the buyer without disclosing the information...

We investigate the role of market transparency in repeated first-price auctions. We consider a setting with private and independent values across bidders. The values are assumed to be perfectly persistent over time. We analyze the first-price auction under three distinct disclosure regimes...

A game of incomplete information can be decomposed into a basic game and an information structure. The basic game defines the set of actions, the set of payoff states the payoff functions and the common prior over the payoff states. The information structure refers to the signals that the...

We analyse strategic experimentation in which information arrives through fully revealing, publicly observable “breakdowns.” With hidden actions, there exists a unique equilibrium that involves randomization over stopping times. This randomization induces belief disagreement on the...

This paper studies strategic information transmission in a dynamic environment where, each period, a privately informed expert sends a message and a decision maker takes an action. Our main result is that, in contrast to a static environment, full information revelation is possible. The gradual...

Different markets are cleared by different types of prices -- seller-specific prices that are uniform across buyers in some markets, and personalized prices tailored to the buyer in others. We examine a setting in which buyers and sellers make investments before matching in a competitive market....