We present a dynamic model of trading under adverse selection in which a seller sequentially meets buyers, each of whom receives a noisy signal about the quality of the seller’s asset and offers a price. We fully characterize the equilibrium trading dynamics and show that buyers’ beliefs about the quality of the asset can either increase or decrease over time, depending on the initial level. This result demonstrates how the introduction of private buyer signals enriches the set of trading patterns that can be accommodated within the framework of dynamic adverse selection, thereby broadening its applicability. We also examine the economic effects of search frictions and the informativeness of buyers’ signals in our model and discuss the robustness of our main insights in multiple directions.

We consider an oligopoly model in which each firm chooses not only its price but also its advertising strategy regarding how much, and what, product information to provide. To highlight firms’ strategic incentives, we impose no structural restrictions on feasible advertising content, so that each firm can disclose or conceal any information. We obtain a comprehensive characterization of the equilibrium advertising strategy and provide some sufficient conditions for the existence of symmetric pure-price equilibria. We show that intense competition induces firms to provide accurate product information; firms usually obfuscate consumers’ relatively low or high values; and requiring firms to provide more product information can reduce social surplus and also be harmful to consumers.