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October 5, 20250 citationsOpen Access

Persuasion in Lemons Markets

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APAndrea Di Giovan PaoloJHJose Higueras

Key Points

  • Optimizing trade volume leads to negative-assortative matching, mixing efficient and inefficient sellers.
  • The designer faces constraints on posteriors, influencing how information is revealed in market signals.
  • When focusing on price and surplus, optimal signals can reveal low quality or cluster types together.
  • The study reformulates the designer's problem using martingale optimal transport techniques for insights.

Abstract

We study information disclosure in competitive markets with adverse selection. Sellers privately observe product quality, with higher quality entailing higher production costs, while buyers trade at the market-clearing price after observing a public signal. Because sellers' participation in trade conveys information about quality, the designer faces endogenous constraints in the set of posteriors that she can induce. We reformulate the designer's problem as a martingale optimal transport exercise with an additional condition that rules out further information transmission through sellers' participation decisions, and characterize the optimal signals. When the designer maximizes trade volume, the solution features negative-assortative matching of inefficient and efficient sellers. When the objective is a weighted combination of price and surplus, optimal signals preserve this structure as long as the weight on the price is high enough, otherwise they fully reveal low-quality types while pooling middle types with high-quality sellers.

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Cite This Study

Paolo et al. (2025) studied this question.

synapsesocial.com/papers/68e25382d6d66a53c2474a93https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2510.01413
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