We study government interventions in markets suffering from adverse selection. Importantly, asymmetric information prevents both the realization of gains from trade and the production of information that is valuable to other market participants. We find a fundamental tension in maximizing welfare: while some intervention is required to restore trading, too much intervention depletes trade of its informational content. We characterize the optimal policy that balances these two considerations, and explore how it depends on features of the environment. Our model can be used to study a program introduced in 2009 to restore information production in the market for legacy assets.

We consider a large market where auctioneers with private reservation values compete for bidders by announcing cheap-talk messages. If auctioneers run efficient first-price auctions, then there always exists an equilibrium in which each auctioneer truthfully reveals her type. The equilibrium is constrained efficient, assigning more bidders to auctioneers with larger gains from trade. The choice of the trading mechanism is crucial for the result. Most notably, the use of second-price auctions (equivalently, ex post bidding) leads to the non-existence of any informative equilibrium. We examine the robustness of our finding in various dimensions, including finite markets and equilibrium selection.

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.

We study government interventions in markets suffering from adverse selection. Importantly, asymmetric information prevents both the realization of gains from trade and the production of information that is valuable to other market participants. We find a fundamental tension in maximizing welfare: while some intervention is required to restore trading, too much intervention depletes trade of its informational content. We characterize the optimal policy that balances these two considerations, and explore how it depends on features of the environment. Our model can be used to study a program introduced in 2009 to restore information production in the market for legacy assets.

We consider a dynamic model of Bayesian persuasion in which information takes time and is costly for the sender to generate and for the receiver to process, and neither player can commit to their future actions. Persuasion may totally collapse in a Markov perfect equilibrium of this game. However, for persuasion costs sufficiently small, a version of a folk theorem holds: outcomes that approximate Kamenica and Gentzkow’s sender-optimal persuasion as well as full revelation and everything in between are obtained in Markov perfect equilibrium as the cost vanishes.

We consider an oligopoly model in which consumers engage in sequential search based on partial product information and advertised prices. By applying Weitzman's (1979) optimal sequential search solution, we derive a simple static condition that fully summarizes consumers' shopping outcomes and translates the pricing game among the sellers into a familiar discrete‐choice problem. Exploiting the discrete‐choice reformulation, we provide sufficient conditions that guarantee the existence and uniqueness of market equilibrium and analyze the effects of preference diversity and search frictions on market prices. Among other things, we show that a reduction in search costs raises market prices.