Econometrica

Journal Of The Econometric Society

An International Society for the Advancement of Economic
Theory in its Relation to Statistics and Mathematics

Edited by: Guido W. Imbens • Print ISSN: 0012-9682 • Online ISSN: 1468-0262

Econometrica: Jul, 2012, Volume 80, Issue 4

Waiting for News in the Market for Lemons

https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA9278
p. 1433-1504

Brendan Daley, Brett Green

We study a dynamic setting in which stochastic information () about the value of a privately informed seller's asset is gradually revealed to a market of buyers. We construct an equilibrium that involves periods of no trade or . The no‐trade period ends in one of two ways: either enough good news arrives, restoring confidence and markets reopen, or bad news arrives, making buyers more pessimistic and forcing that is, a partial sell‐off of low‐value assets. Conditions under which the equilibrium is unique are provided. We analyze welfare and efficiency as they depend on the quality of the news. Higher quality news can lead to more inefficient outcomes. Our model encompasses settings with or without a standard static adverse selection problem—in a dynamic setting with sufficiently informative news, reservation values arise endogenously from the option to sell in the future and the two environments have the same equilibrium structure.


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Supplemental Material

Supplement to "Waiting for News in the Market for Lemons"

The purpose of this supplement is to establish the strong connection between the continuous-time model of Daley and Green (2011) and a discrete-time analog.