Middlemen: the good, the bad, and the ugly

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Biglaiser, Gary; Li, Fei
• 署名单位: University of North Carolina; University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
• 刊物名称: RAND JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0741-6261
• DOI: 10.1111/1756-2171.12216
• 发表日期: 2018
• 页码: 3-22
• 关键词: endogenous quality; certification; INFORMATION; INVESTMENT; MARKETS; ratings

摘要

We examine the role of a middleman as an expert in markets. A seller's effort determines the quality of the good. Buyers observe neither the seller's effort nor the good's quality. A middleman, after observing a signal about the good's quality, decides whether to purchase it and then to sell it. We show that the presence of a middleman may either reduce or exacerbate the seller's moral hazard problem. We also consider a model with multiple middlemen. We find that the seller's effort is minimized if either the middleman's signal is perfect or the number of middlemen is large.