In this contribution, I would like to explore the extent to which we can survive in a world without regulatively privileged informational intermediaries, and to the extent that we cannot, whether there are ways to regulate their conduct with a view to improving the utility of their output. I...

A seller has an object for sale and can reach buyers only through intermediaries, who also have privileged information about buyers’ valuations. Intermediaries can either mediate the transaction by buying the object and reselling it–the merchant model–or refer buyers to the seller and...

We model a scenario in which there are three types of investors: fundamentalists, speculators, and trend-followers and an intermediary who cares about his reputation. Fundamentalists are rational investors with long horizons who are interested in the dividend stream. Speculators are rational...

This research provides evidence on the role of information asymmetry and personal affiliations in housing transactions using a novel dataset that allows observation of detailed information about the property, broker, and seller. Sellers holding a real estate license are found to obtain about 1.6...

We examine whether brokers in order-driven markets possess an information advantage over their customers. We compare the price impact of proprietary trades to customer trades in Borsa Istanbul. We find an asymmetric effect: While proprietary buy trades lead to a significant price response...

We derive closed-form strategies for a broker who provides liquidity to an informed trader and to a noise trader over a finite-time and infinite-time trading horizon. The flow of the noise trader is uninformative and the broker trades with the noise trader at a profit, on average. On the other...