The traditional theory of monopolistic screening tackles individual self-selection but does not address the possibility that buyers could form a coalition to coordinate their purchases and to reallocate the goods. In this paper, we design the optimal sale mechanism which takes into account both individual and coalition incentive compatibility focusing on the role of asymmetric information among buyers. We show that when a coalition of buyers is formed under asymmetric information, the monopolist can do as well as when there is no coalition. Although in the optimal sale mechanism marginal rates of substitution are not equalized across buyers (hence there exists room for arbitrage), they fail to realize the gains from arbitrage because of the transaction costs in coalition formation generated by asymmetric information.
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Paper provided by Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra in its series Economics Working Papers with number
624.
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.:
McAfee, R Preston & McMillan, John, 1992.
"Bidding Rings,"
American Economic Review,
American Economic Association, vol. 82(3), pages 579-99, June.
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McAfee, R. Preston & McMillan, John., 1990.
"Bidding Rings,"
Working Papers
726, California Institute of Technology, Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences.
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