We analyze a bilateral trade model where the buyer chooses the distribution of her valuation for the good. The seller, after observing the buyer’s distribution but not the realized valuation, makes a take-it-or-leave-it offer. If distributions are costless, the price and the payoffs of both the buyer and the seller are shown to be 1/e in the unique equilibrium outcome. The buyer’s equilibrium distribution generates a unit-elastic demand, and trade is ex post efficient. These properties are shown to be preserved even when different distributions are differentially costly as long as the cost is monotone in the dispersion of the distribution.

In many markets, goods flow from initial producers to final customers travelling through many layers of intermediaries and information is asymmetric. We study a dynamic model of bargaining in networks that captures these features.We show that the equilibrium price demanded over time is non-monotonic, but the sequence of transaction prices declines over time, with the possible exception of the last period. The price dynamic is, therefore, reminiscent of fire-sales and hot-potato trading. Traders who intermediate the object arise endogenously and make a positive profit. The profit-earning intermediaries are not necessarily traders with many connections; for the case of multilayer networks, they belong to the path that reaches the maximum number of potential buyers using the minimal number of intermediaries. This is not necessarily the path of the network that maximizes the probability of consumption by traders who value the most the object (i.e. welfare).