The paper investigates credibility of the intermediary's advice in a bilateral trade model. A seller and a buyer with private and independent uniformly distributed valuations exchange a unit of good. Their trade is mediated by an intermediary, who at the pre-bargaining stage observes a coarse signal about the buyer's valuation and reveals some information to the seller. We first show that if the broker gets a fixed fee for each executed transaction, he can transmit his information credibly via cheap talk. Full information revelation can be sustained even when the intermediary's information about the buyer becomes arbitrarily precise. The transmission of information by the broker increases ex ante welfare of the seller and the broker, but has ambiguous impact on the buyer. If the intermediary observes signals about valuations of both participants, the fully revealing equilibrium exists only under certain restrictions on parameters of the model. Another limit to effcient communication can be imposed by competition between intermediaries. We then consider the mechanism design problem for an informed intermediary, and prove that choosing an appropriate system of two-part tariffs allows the intermediary to secure the same payoff as in the optimal direct mechanism.
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Paper provided by Center for Economic and Financial Research (CEFIR) in its series Working Papers with number
w0121.
Length: 41 pages Date of creation: Oct 2008 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:cfr:cefirw:w0121
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References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Jean-Charles Rochet Author-Email: rochet@cict.fr Author-Workplace-Name: IDEI, University of Toulouse & Jean Tirole Author-Email: tirole@cict.fr Author-Workplace-Name: IDEI, University of Toulouse, 2006.
"Two-Sided Markets: A Progress Report,"
RAND Journal of Economics,
The RAND Corporation, vol. 37(3), pages 645-667, Autumn.
Other versions:
Roland Strausz, 2004.
"Honest Certification and the Threat of Capture,"
Discussion Papers
25, SFB/TR 15 Governance and the Efficiency of Economic Systems, Free University of Berlin, Humboldt University of Berlin, University of Bonn, University of Mannheim, University of Munich.
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