Is the reputation of a firm tradable when the change in ownership is observable? We consider a competitive market in which a share of owners must retire in each period. New owners bid for the firms that are for sale. Customers learn the owner's type, which reflects the quality of the good or...

Who does, and who should initiate costly certification by a third party under asymmetric quality information, the buyer or the seller? Our answer '€" the seller '€" follows from a non-trivial analysis revealing a clear intuition. Buyer-induced certification acts as an inspection device,...

We define path-dependency as the generic phenomenon according to which agents take an action regardless of their private information. Path-dependency can be of two types contingent on whether agents act with the crowd (herding) or against the crowd (contrarianism). We consider a quote-driven...

This paper revisits recent empirical research on buyer credulity in arts auctions and auctions for assets in general. We show that elementary results in auction theory can fully account for some stylized facts on asset returns that have been held to suggest that sellers of assets can exploit...

The existence of a linear equilibrium in Kyle's model of market making with multiple, symmetrically informed strategic traders is implied for any number of strategic traders if the joint distribution of the underlying exogenous random variables is elliptical. The reverse implication has been...

We provide several generalizations of Mailath's (1987) result that in games of asymmetric information with a continuum of types incentive compatibility plus separation implies differentiability of the informed agent's strategy. The new results extend the theory to classic models in finance such...

Certifiers contribute to the sound functioning of markets by reducing a symmetric information. They, however, have been heavily criticized during the 2008-09 financial crisis. This paper investigates on which side of the market a monopolistic profit-maximizing certifier offers his service. If...

Pay What You Want (PWYW) and Name Your Own Price (NYOP) are customerdriven pricing mechanisms that give customers (some) pricing power. Both have been used in service industries with high fixed capacity costs in order to appeal to additional customers by reducing prices without setting a...

Lecture on the first SFB/TR 15 meeting, Gummersbach, July, 18 - 20, 2004: We develop a general theoretical framework of trade on a platform on which buyers and sellers interact. The platform may be owned by a single large, or many small independent or vertically integrated intermediaries. We...

This paper analyzes delegation and joint decision making in an environment with private information and partially aligned preferences. We compare the benefits of these two decision making procedures as well as the interaction between them. We give a condition under which delegation is preferred...