We examine the conditions under which competitive equilibria can be obtained as the limit, when the number of strategic traders gets large, of Nash equilibria in economies with asymmetric information on agents' effort and possibly imperfect observability of agents' trades. Convergence always occur when either effort is publicly observed (no matter what is the information available to intermediaries on agents' trades); or effort is private information but agents' trades are perfectly observed; or no information at all is available on agents' trades. On the other hand, when each intermediary can observe its trades with an agent, but not the agent's trades with other intermediaries, the (Nash) equilibria with strategic intermediaries do not converge to any of the competitive equilibria, for an open set of economies. The source of the difficulties for convergence is the combination of asymmetric information and the restrictions on the observability of trades which prevent the formation of exclusive contractual relationships and generate barriers to entry in the markets for contracts.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra in its series Economics Working Papers with number
381.
Find related papers by JEL classification: D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information D50 - Microeconomics - - General Equilibrium and Disequilibrium - - - General
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:
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.:
Cited by: (explanations, 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.)