Extreme adverse selection arises when private information has unbounded support, and market breakdown occurs when no trade is the only equilibrium outcome. We study extreme adverse selection via the limit behavior of a financial market as the support of private information converges to an...

I build a model of optimal managerial compensation where managers each have a privately observed propensity to manipulate short-term stock prices. It is shown that this informational asymmetry reverses some of the conventional wisdom about the relationship between reliance on short-term pay and...

The paper provides evidence on what affects at the margin the cost and availability of bank credit for firms in Argentina. We study in particular how banks use different pieces of private and public information to screen firms and overcome informational asymmetries in the credit market. Some...

In this paper we set forth a new perspective from which to understand and measure the brokerage of asymmetric information that intermediaries usually carry out. Firstly, we deal with partitions of a given set so as to lay grounds to our line of research. Secondly, we argue that trade splits up...

Economists and financial analysts have begun to recognise the importance of the actions of other agents in the decision-making process. Herding is the deliberate mimicking of the decisions of other agents. Examples of mimicry range from the choice of restaurant, fashion and financial market...

In the model there are two types of financial auditors with identical technology, one of which is endowed with a prior reputation for honesty. We characterize conditions under which there exists a 'two-tier equilibrium' in which 'reputable' auditors refuse bribes offered by clients for fear of...

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...