Incentive-compatible contracts for the sale information

An informed financial institution can trade on private information and also sell it to clients through a managed fund. To provide an incentive for the informed agent to trade in the interest of her client, the optimal contract requires that she be compensated as an increasing function of the profits of the fund. The optimal contract is also designed to limit the aggressiveness of the sum of the fund's trade and the proprieatary trade. This reduces information revelation and thes leads to greater overall trading profits than if the informed agent only conducted proprietary trades

Asymmetries of Information in Electronic Systems

We study the efficiency of the equilibrium price in a centralized, order-driven market where asymmetrically informed traders are active for several periods and can observe each other current and past orders, as in electronic systems of trading. We show that the more precise the information the higher the incentive to reveal it in the first trading rounds. On the contrary, strategic competition forces the less informed trader to wait the end of the trading period to reveal his information. This implies that when differences in information quality are very important, the liquidity of the market decreases as we approach the date of public revelation. We are able to show that more transparent markets as the ones organized via electronic systems are not performing better than markets organized on floor trade in terms of revelation of information, due to the oligopolistic behavior of insidersasymmetric information, liquidity, insider trading, strategic revelation

Price, Trade Size, and Information Revelation in Multi-Period Securities Markets

We study price formation in securities markets, using the sequential trade framework of Glosten and Milgrom. This paper makes one basic methodological advance over previous research on sequential securities trading: we allow for multiple trade sizes for traders to choose from in a multi-period market. We examine how trade size multiplicity affects the intertemporal dynamics of trading strategies, bid-ask spreads, and information revelation. We also show that price impact, as a function of trade size, is increasing and exhibits (discrete) concavity.

Antidumping as Strategic Trade Policy Under Asymmetric Information

This paper investigates the domestic government’s antidumping duty choice in an asymmetric information framework where the foreign firm’s cost is observed by the domestic firm, but not by the government. To induce truthful revelation, the government can design a tariff schedule, contingent on firms’ cost reports, accompanied by a threat of auditing and implementing penalty duties. We show that the antidumping framework within GATT/WTO may not only offer the means to pursue strategic trade policy disguised as fair trade policy, but may also help overcome the informational problems with regard to determining the optimal strategic trade policy.antidumping duties, asymmetric information, trade protection, strategic trade policy

Fighting Collusion in Tournaments

This paper proposes a new approach of fighting collusion in tournaments which sheds light on the principle of divide and conquer: the principal can benefit from manipulating information revelation, by which he brings asymmetric information between the agents and thus creates a distortion of efficiency in the coalition. We employ a simple tournament setting where, due to perfect collusion, the efficient effort levels are impossible to be implemented through simple mechanisms. We propose a sophisticated mechanism with a biased promotion rule that allows the principal to manipulate the revelation of information and make asymmetric information between the agents, which brings trade-offs between rent-extraction and distortion of efficiency into the coalition. We show that, it is possible to implement efficient effort levels under the sophisticated mechanism. JEL Classification: C72, D82collusion; tournament

A Double Auction Market with Signals of Varying Precision

A computerized double auction market with human traders is employed to examine the relation of price and volume under conditions of asymmetric information. In this market, the informed traders receive higher precision signals than the uninformed traders. The relation of price and volume has been suggested as an important factor in the process of information revelation whereby information held by informed traders is transferred to uninformed traders. In contrast, the no-trade theorems suggest that trade should not occur at all between informed and uninformed traders. The results show trading volume within the informed group to be positively correlated with signal precision. In situations of asymmetric information, uninformed trading activity as measured by volume/precision correlations declines significantly as the precision of the signals of informed traders increases. However, the presence of asymmetric information does not lead to a zero trade condition for either the informed or the uninformed traders.Experimental, Double Auction, Information Precision, Trading Volume, Asymmetric Information

Asymmetries of information in centralized order-driven markets

We study the efficiency of the equilibrium price in a centralized, order-driven market where many asymmetrically informed traders are active for many periods. We show that asymmetries of information can lead to sub-optimal information revelation with respect to the symmetric case. In particular, we assess that the more precise the information the higher the incentive to reveal it, and that the value of private information is related to the volume of exogenous trade present on the market. Moreover, we prove that any informed trader, whatever his information, reveals his private signal during an active phase of the market, concluding that long pre-opening phases are not effective as an information discovering device in the presence of strategic players.Asymmetric information; pre-opening; insider trading

A Market-based Approach to Multi-factory Scheduling

In this paper, we report on the design of a novel market-based approach for decentralised scheduling across multiple factories. Specifically, because of the limitations of scheduling in a centralised manner -- which requires a center to have complete and perfect information for optimality and the truthful revelation of potentially commercially private preferences to that center -- we advocate an informationally decentralised approach that is both agile and dynamic. In particular, this work adopts a market-based approach for decentralised scheduling by considering the different stakeholders representing different factories as self-interested, profit-motivated economic agents that trade resources for the scheduling of jobs. The overall schedule of these jobs is then an emergent behaviour of the strategic interaction of these trading agents bidding for resources in a market based on limited information and their own preferences. Using a simple (zero-intelligence) bidding strategy, we empirically demonstrate that our market-based approach achieves a lower bound efficiency of 84%. This represents a trade-off between a reasonable level of efficiency (compared to a centralised approach) and the desirable benefits of a decentralised solution

Optimal Initial Public O¤ering design with aftermarket trading.

We characterize the optimal pricing and allocation of shares in the presence of distinct adverse selection problems. Some investors have private information at the time of the IPO and sell their shares in the after-market upon facing liquidity needs. Others learn their private interest in the after-market, and sell their shares strategically. The optimal mechanism trades-o¤ informational rents and rents to strategic traders. Flipping facilitates truthful information revelation. When liquidity needs are likely, it is optimal to allocate all shares to investors informed at the IPO stage. Otherwise, some shares are allocated to those who trade strategically in the after-market.