Selling with evidence

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Koessler, Frederic; Skreta, Vasiliki
• 署名单位: Paris School of Economics; Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS); University of Texas System; University of Texas Austin; University of London; University College London
• 刊物名称: THEORETICAL ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1933-6837
• DOI: 10.3982/TE2885
• 发表日期: 2019-05-01
• 页码: 345-371
• 关键词: Informed principal; consumer heterogeneity; interdependent valuations; product information disclosure; mechanism design; certification

摘要

We study the informed-principal problem in a bilateral asymmetric information trading setting with interdependent values and quasi-linear utilities. The informed seller proposes a mechanism and voluntarily certifies information about the good's characteristics. When the set of certifiable statements is sufficiently rich, we show that there is an ex ante profit-maximizing selling procedure that is an equilibrium of the mechanism proposal game. In contrast to posted price settings, the allocation obtained when product characteristics are commonly known (the unravelling outcome) may not be an equilibrium allocation, even when all buyer types agree on the ranking of product quality. Our analysis relies on the concept of strong Pareto optimal allocation, which was originally introduced by Maskin and Tirole (1990) in private value environments.