We study the informational role of prices in a stochastic environment. We provide a closed-form solution of the monopoly problem when the price imperfectly signals quality to the uninformed buyers. We then study the effect of noise on output, market price, information flows, and expected...

A patent holder owning a two-period lasting innovation is unable to push it into the market, so it is licensed to a downstream user with production capabilities to market it. The production cost of this firm can be low or high, but the patent holder has only a prior on this fact

If an intermediary offers sellers a platform to reach consumers, he may face the following hold-up problem: sellers suspect the intermediary will enter their respective product market as a merchant after they have sunk fixed costs of entry. Therefore, fearing that their investments cannot be...

This paper deals with trade platforms whose operators not only allow third party sellers to offer their products to consumers, but also offer products themselves. In this context, the platform operator faces a hold-up problem if he uses classical twopart tariffs only as potential competition...

The disclosure requirements for firms issuing equity on German crowdinvestingplatforms are quite lax at the moment. This paper states that this loose requirement policy is not optimal in the presence of competition among platforms. First, a simple three-staged theoretical model is derived to...

The disclosure requirements for firms issuing equity on German crowdinvestingplatforms are quite lax at the moment. This paper states that this loose requirement policy is not optimal in the presence of competition among platforms. First, a simple three-staged theoretical model is derived to...

How much information should brokers supply on a website? The Internet allows brokers to reduce the cost of providing information to potential buyers. However, brokers may risk disintermediation if they provide too much information. This paper presents a model of a broker's choice of how much...

This paper considers when a firm's deliberately chosen name can signal meaningful information about its quality, focusing specifically on a setting in which it does: plumbing firms with names that begin with an "A" or a number receive five times more service complaints, on average. In addition,...