The author assumes that customers do not continuously participate in all markets and that intermediaries are repositories of information about the ("unexpressed") demands of currently nonparticipating customers. A model of downstairs (i.e., centralized) versus upstairs (i.e., fragmented) markets is developed based on the assumption that upstairs (and not downstairs) dealers may possess information about unexpressed demand. The equilibrium liquidity of both markets is characterized by the trade-off between the benefits of information about unexpressed demand and the cost to the customer of trading in a fragmented market.
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Sanford J. Grossman (1992) studied this question.
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