This paper shows that a transaction tax makes trades in decentralized markets more information sensitive and enlarges the range of information costs for which the equilibrium exhibits private information acquisition and endogenous adverse selection. A transaction tax reduces the probability of...

We consider a standard persuasion problem in which the receiver’s action and the state of the world are both one-dimensional. Fully characterizing optimal signals when utilities are non-linear is a daunting task. Instead, we develop a general approach to understanding a key qualitative...

In this paper we analyze a legislative bargaining game in which parties privately informed about their preferences bargain over an ideological and a distributive decision. Communication takes place before a proposal is offered and majority rule voting determines the outcome. When the private...

In this paper we analyze a legislative bargaining game in which parties privately informed about their preferences bargain over an ideological and a distributive decision. Communication takes place before a proposal is offered and majority rule voting determines the outcome. When the private...

We study a strategic model of dynamic trading where agents are asymmetrically informed over common value sources of uncertainty. There is a continuum of buyers and a finite number n of sellers. All buyers are uninformed, while at least one seller is privately informed about the true state of the...

This paper studies asset markets where buyers of assets do not inherit private information from previous owners and must learn asset quality over time. Imperfect information transmission reduces asymmetric information, but also reduces the trading volume, prices and efficiency. This result is...

I consider a simple bilateral trading game between a seller and a buyer who have private valuations for an indivisible good. The seller makes a price offer which the buyer can either accept or reject. If the seller can observe the valuation of the buyer (if information is symmetric), then...

The competitive market is informationally efficient; people only need to know prices to implement a competitive outcome. However, the standard formulation of competition neglects any underlying market microstructure; prices—which provide all necessary information—are exogenous. This paper...

In a market in which sellers compete for heterogeneous buyers by posting mechanisms, we analyze how the properties of the meeting technology affect the allocation of buyers to sellers. We show that a separate submarket for each type of buyer is the efficient outcome if and only if meetings are...