We study market breakdown in a finance context under extreme adverse selection with and without competitive pricing. Adverse selection is extreme if for any price there are informed agent types with whom uninformed agents prefer not to trade. Market breakdown occurs when no trade is the only...

This paper investigates conditions under which the adverse selection principal-agent problem can be decomposed into a collection of pointwise maximization problems. The analysis uses an extension of the type assignment approach to optimal nonuniform pricing, pioneered by Goldman, Leland and...

In this article, we analyze the canonical hold-up model of Hart and Moore under the assumption that the courts can verify delivery of the good by the seller. It is shown that no further renegotiation design is necessary to achieve the first best: simple option contracts, which give the seller...