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Journal ArticleDOI

Efficiency and Information Transmission in Bilateral Trading

01 Jul 2019-Review of Economic Dynamics (Academic Press)-Vol. 33, pp 154-176
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors study pairwise trading in the presence of one-sided or two-sided private information and limited commitment, and show that when one trader's information is relevant for the other trader's value of the asset, optimal trading arrangements may necessarily conceal the traders' information.
About: This article is published in Review of Economic Dynamics.The article was published on 2019-07-01 and is currently open access. It has received 3 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Trading turret & Electronic trading.

Summary (4 min read)

1 Introduction

  • If existing arrangements strive for trading efficiency, then their results imply that information transmission may be purposefully prevented in the marketplace.
  • A key attribute of these markets is that many buyers and sellers are financially sophisticated traders who, under certain circumstances, may have private information about an asset’s cash flow.
  • A distinguishing feature of their approach is that the authors also impose ex post participation constraints: after the mechanism recommends that trade takes place at a particular price, both traders have the option to walk away, given all the information available at that time.
  • Even in cases where the no-commitment and commitment allocation coincide, the implications for information revelation are different.

2 One-Sided Private Information

  • One of the traders, the seller, initially owns the asset.
  • Throughout this section, the authors assume that the seller privately observes a signal and so has more information than the buyer.
  • The one-sided private information assumption is perhaps harder to justify in the context of financial markets, since buyers and sellers can each observe some public information about the asset and can conduct research that may grant them access to other signals.
  • Following Kennan and Wilson (1993), the authors view the mechanism design approach as informative about what traders may accomplish through any mechanism, including bargaining, given the restrictions implied by private information and technology.

2.1 Interim Optimal Mechanisms

  • The authors start by analyzing Pareto optimal trading mechanisms.
  • Using the revelation principle (Myerson, 1979), the authors know that any trading mechanism is payoffequivalent to a direct revelation mechanism.
  • The first constraint imposes that the buyer’s expected profit is at least u; by varying u the authors trace out the Pareto frontier between the expected profit for the seller and buyer.
  • This implies that if a seller with some other signal s′′ has an incentive to truthfully report s′′ rather than s, he also has an incentive to truthfully report s′′ rather than s′.

2.2 Information Revelation and Ex Post Participation

  • The mechanism design problem (1) is a technical device for characterizing possible trading arrangement given the constraints implied by private information.
  • In their view, problem (1) ignores an important constraint on real world trading arrangements.
  • The ex post participation constraint imposes that the buyer earns nonnegative profits at any trading price p, an additional constraint on feasible trading mechanisms.
  • The authors view condition (2) as being quite weak.
  • With such a mechanism, the buyer is left with a coarser information set than the seller, sometimes knowing only that the seller’s report was smaller than s1, other times knowing only that it lay in between s′1 and s2.

2.3 Cost of Full Information Revelation

  • Proposition 2 establishes that, under certain circumstances, it is possible to implement the solution to problem (1) while satisfying the buyer’s ex post participation constraint.
  • The buyer must also be willing to trade at that price, correctly interpreting how that price was influenced by the seller’s signal.
  • The authors prove that full information revelation reduces the value of the seller.
  • To show this, the authors modify problem (1) by adding one more constraint, q(s)b(s)− t(s) ≥ 0 for all s. (3) The buyer must earn nonnegative profit at each value of the seller’s signal.
  • This approach is more convenient but has little practical impact on their results.

3 Two-Sided Private Information

  • The authors turn next to the realistic case where both the buyer and seller have private information.
  • The basic structure of the model is unchanged, except for the fact that the buyer now also has a signal.
  • After briefly describing the economic environment, the authors formally discuss the constraints on mechanisms that arise from private information and the lack of commitment from both parties.
  • The authors end the section by discussing the additional constraints imposed by full information revelation.

3.1 Preferences and Information

  • Both the buyer and seller receive a signal and the authors assume for analytical convenience that the signal is binary, b ∈ {0, 1} denotes the buyer’s signal and s ∈ {0, 1} denotes the seller’s.
  • Let πbs denote the ex ante joint probability that the buyer receives signal b and the seller receives signal s.
  • The buyer’s expected value for the asset is vBbs when the buyer’s signal is b and the seller’s signal is s.
  • But more generally, each trader’s willingness to trade depends on their belief about the other traders’ signals.
  • Different trading mechanisms allow a trader to refuse to trade based on different information sets.

3.2 Feasible Mechanisms

  • The authors are interested in understanding the set of feasible trades given the constraints imposed both by private information and by the ability of either trader to walk away from the deal after learning the terms of trade.
  • This again motivates a mechanism design approach.
  • The authors contrast this with the standard interim constraints, EB(vBbs − p|b) ≥ 0 and ES(vBbs − p|s) ≥ 0, which require that the trader’s expected profits are nonnegative only at the interim stage, before they learn the price recommended by the mechanism.
  • The outer expectation is taken over prices, conditioning only on the trader’s own signal and report.
  • As explained above, this is a constrained version of the standard mechanism design problem, which imposes only an interim participation constraint and an interim incentive compatibility constraint.

3.3 Formal Characterization of Mechanisms

  • This section provides a formal characterization of veto incentive compatible mechanisms.
  • There exists a feasible veto incentive compatible mechanism with the same trading probabilities and expected payoffs conditional on any signals (b, s), in which the recommendation is always of the form p ∈ {p1, p2, . . . , p13,∅}.
  • 6Formally, the buyer’s ex post participation constraint follows from the buyer’s veto incentive compatibility constraints with b = b̂, and similarly for the seller.
  • The finding that the authors use at most 13 prices depends on the dimension of the signals that the buyer and seller receive.
  • The exact expression uses the observation that ωn|bsπbs is the probability that the price is pn, the buyer’s signal is b, and the seller’s signal is s.

3.4 Fully-Revealing Mechanisms

  • A fully-revealing veto incentive compatible mechanism is a feasible veto incentive compatible mechanism in which the mechanism is constrained to reveal each trader’s report to the other trader before a trade is consummated.
  • If the mechanism recommends trading at a price pbs when the buyer’s report is b and the seller’s report is s, then both the buyer and seller must be willing to trade at that price knowing the other trader’s signal.
  • It is straightforward to verify that a fully-revealing mechanism needs to use at most one price per report pair (b, s), i.e. at most four prices in their scenario.
  • The objective function is essentially unchanged from the interim and veto-incentive compatible problems.
  • The final two constraints ensure that neither trader wishes to misrepresent his signal, allowing for the possibility that the trader then refuses to trade following certain reports by the other trade.

4 Private Values

  • The authors briefly comment on the private values case, a common simplifying assumption in the mechanism design literature (Myerson and Satterthwaite, 1983; McAfee and Reny, 1992).
  • If the buyer knows the seller has a low signal, he will be unwilling to pay a high price for the asset.
  • In contrast, it may be possible to sustain more efficient trading arrangements by keeping some information private.
  • The remainder of the paper shows how this works.

5 Common Values

  • The authors now turn to the case with common values.
  • The authors start by introducing a useful example which parametrizes the information structure in a way that lends itself easily to interpretation and assumes a constant gain from trade.
  • The authors then solve for mechanisms that maximize the sum of utilities, or equivalently, the gains from trade.
  • The authors then turn to mechanisms that impose full information revelation and show that this restriction is costly.
  • Finally, the authors study other efficient mechanisms that trace out the Pareto frontier between the buyer and seller.

5.1 An Example

  • The authors focus on a particular example which illustrates some general properties of the model.
  • As motivation for the payoff structure, suppose that the state of the world is δ ∈ {0, 1}, taking on each value with equal probability.
  • Here γ denotes the constant gains from trade.
  • The signals are independent conditional on the asset’s payoff, but they are only imperfectly correlated with the payoff.
  • To put a more economic interpretation on the example, the authors view the buyer’s and seller’s signals as models of the asset’s cash flow.

5.2 Trade Maximization

  • The authors start by describing the solution to the veto incentive compatible problem (7) with equal Pareto weights, φ = 1/2.
  • The following proposition characterizes the optimal mechanism: Proposition 7.
  • Figure 1 shows the three regions of the parameter space.
  • A seller with the high signal would refuse to sell at the intermediate price if she doesn’t know the buyer’s signal, and similarly a buyer with the low signal would refuse to buy at the intermediate price if he doesn’t know the seller’s signal.
  • Any veto incentive compatible trading arrangement must reveal some information.

5.3 Fully Revealing Mechanisms

  • The authors highlight the cost of information revelation by solving the full revelation problem (9).
  • Conversely, in the third case in Proposition 7, the authors proposed implementing the optimum using a fully revealing mechanism.
  • This is illustrated on the right hand side of the equality.
  • As a result, the trading probability λ is lower when the buyer has the low signal and the seller has the high signal.

5.4 Pareto Frontier

  • The authors close by exploring the set of feasible payoffs more generally.
  • The basic issue is that an optimal mechanism in the interim problem may set a higher expected price when the buyer reports the low signal than when he reports the high signal: t0s/q0s > t1s/q1s for some s.
  • The intermediate shaded region is the set of payoffs that can additionally be obtained using a veto incentive compatible mechanism, i.e. a feasible policy in problem (7).
  • This gives the seller expected profit 0.214.

6 Conclusion

  • This paper highlights the transmission of information within a single trade.
  • In other cases, the unconstrained optimum is unattainable, but efficient trading arrangements still conceal information by making the trading price insensitive to information and possibly random conditional on all available information.
  • Thus their basic approach trivially carries over to this environment.
  • Minimizing the information that the insurance company learns from the mortgage originator enhances both trading and retrading efficiency.

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Citations
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, a model of over-the-counter markets is proposed, where some asset buyers are informed in that they can identify high quality assets, and heterogeneous sellers with private information choose what type of buyers they want to trade with.
Abstract: A model of over-the-counter markets is proposed. Some asset buyers are informed in that they can identify high quality assets. Heterogeneous sellers with private information choose what type of buyers they want to trade with.

2 citations


Cites background or methods from "Efficiency and Information Transmis..."

  • ...This condition is equivalent to λ ≥ λ∗, where λ∗ is given by 9 Recently, Shimer and Werning (2019) relax this commitment assumption....

    [...]

  • ...6 For the mechanism that I use in the bilateral trading, I follow the literature on bargaining under asymmetric information using the mechanism design approach: Myerson (1979), Myerson and Satterthwaite (1983), Samuelson (1984), and recently Shimer and Werning (2019)....

    [...]

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A research method of high-frequency information transmission in smart grids based on the CNN-LSTM model is proposed, which effectively combines the superiority of the CNN algorithm for high- frequencies information feature extraction and the learning ability of the LSTM algorithm for global features of high -frequency information.
Abstract: In order to solve the problem of the slow transmission rate of high-frequency information in smart grid and improve the efficiency of information transmission, a research method of high-frequency information transmission in smart grids based on the CNN-LSTM model is proposed. It effectively combines the superiority of the CNN algorithm for high-frequency information feature extraction and the learning ability of the LSTM algorithm for global features of high-frequency information. Meanwhile, the client buffer is divided by the VLAN area division method, which avoids the buffer being too large due to line congestion. The intelligent control module is adopted to change the traditional control concept. In addition, the neural network optimization control module is used for intelligent control, which ensures the feedback speed of the control terminal and avoids the problem of increasing the buffer area caused by the feedback time difference. The experimental results show that via the method in this paper, the total efficiency of single-channel transmission reaches 96% and the transmission rate reaches 46 bit/s; the total efficiency of multiplex transmission is 89% and the transmission rate reaches 75 bit/s. It is verified that the method proposed in this paper has a fast transmission rate and high efficiency.

2 citations

References
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the seller's valuation and the buyer's valuation for a single object are assumed to be independent random variables, and each individual's valuation is unknown to the other.

2,435 citations


"Efficiency and Information Transmis..." refers background in this paper

  • ...We prove in Section 4 that revealing information is costless in pure private values environment, such as Myerson and Satterthwaite (1983)....

    [...]

  • ...We briefly comment on the private values case, a common simplifying assumption in the mechanism design literature (Myerson and Satterthwaite, 1983; McAfee and Reny, 1992)....

    [...]

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the generalized Nash solution proposed by Harsanyi and Selten is applied to this set to define a bargaining solution for Bayesian collective choice problems, and it is shown that the set of expected utility allocations which are feasible with incentive-compatible mechanisms is compact and convex.
Abstract: Collective choice problems are studied from the Bayesian viewpoint. It is shown that the set of expected utility allocations which are feasible with incentive-compatible mechanisms is compact and convex, and includes the equilibrium allocations for all other mechanisms. The generalized Nash solution proposed by Harsanyi and Selten is then applied to this set to define a bargaining solution for Bayesian collective choice problems.

2,011 citations


"Efficiency and Information Transmis..." refers background in this paper

  • ...In the standard mechanism design approach to bargaining (Myerson, 1979), each trader observes his own signal and makes a report to the mechanism, which then instructs the traders on whether and at what price to trade as a function of those reports....

    [...]

  • ...Using the Revelation Principle (Myerson, 1979), we focus without loss of generality on a direct revelation mechanism, where each trader is induced to truthfully report his signal to a mechanism....

    [...]

  • ...Using the revelation principle (Myerson, 1979), we know that any trading mechanism is payoffequivalent to a direct revelation mechanism....

    [...]

  • ...First, Myerson (1979) proves that the seller’s incentive constraint is equivalent to imposing that q(s) is nonincreasing and t(s) = q(s)s + ˆ s̄ s q(v)dv + t(s̄)− q(s̄)s̄ for all s. (13) Substitute this into problem (1) and use integration-by-parts to rewrite it as max {t(s̄),q(s)} ˆ s̄ s…...

    [...]

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors consider a market with two types of traders, "informed" and "uninformed" traders, and study the operation of the price system as an aggregator of different pieces of information, and show that when there are n-types of traders (n > 1), the price reveals information to each trader which is of higher quality than his own information.
Abstract: I HAVE SHOWN elsewhere that competitive markets can be "over-informationally" efficient. (See Grossman [1975] for this and a review of other work in this area.) If competitive prices reveal too much information, traders may not be able to earn a return on their investment in information. This was demonstrated for a market with two types of traders, "informed" and "uninformed." "Informed" traders learn the true underlying probability distribution which generates a future price, and they take a position in the market based on this information. When all informed traders do this, current prices are affected. "Uninformed" traders invest no resources in collecting information, but they know that current prices reflect the information of informed traders. Uninformed traders form their beliefs about a future price from the information of informed traders which they learn from observing current prices. In the above framework, prices transmit information. However, it is often claimed that prices aggregate information. In this paper we analyze a market where there are n-types of informed traders. Each gets a "piece of information." In a simple model we study the operation of the price system as an aggregator of the different pieces of information. We consider a market where there are two assets; a risk free asset and a risky asset. Each unit of the risky asset yields a return of P1 dollars. P1 will also be referred to as the price of the risky asset in period 1. In period 0 (the current period), each trader gets information about P1 and then decides how much of risky and non-risky assets to hold. This determines a current price of the risky asset, P0, which will depend on the information received by all traders. We assume that the ith trader observes yj, where yi = PI + ,E. There is a noise term, 'E, which prevents any trader from learning the true value of P1. The current equilibrium price is a function of (Y1Y25 ... Yn); write it as PO(Y,Y2, ... 5Yn). The main result of this paper is that when there are n-types of traders (n > 1), PO reveals information to each trader which is of "higher quality" than his own information. That is, the competitive system aggregates all the market's information in such a way that the equilibrium price summarizes all the information in the

1,395 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Bank debt (deposits) is an example of this type of liquid security which protect relatively uninformed agents, and as discussed by the authors provides a rationale for deposit insurance in this content, implying that a money market mutual fund-based payments system may be an alternative to one based on insured bank deposits.
Abstract: Trading losses associated with information asymmetries can be mitigated by designing securities which split the cash flows of underlying assets. These securities, which can arise endogenously, have values that do not depend on the information known only to informed agents. Bank debt (deposits) is an example of this type of liquid security which protect relatively uninformed agents, and we provide a rationale for deposit insurance in this content. High-grade corporate debt and government bonds are other examples, implying that a money market mutual fund-based payments system may be an alternative to one based on insured bank deposits.

827 citations

Frequently Asked Questions (2)
Q1. What are the contributions in this paper?

The authors study pairwise trading mechanisms in the presence of private information and limited commitment, whereby either trader can walk away from a proposed trade when he learns the trading price. The authors show that when one trader 's information is relevant for the other trader 's value of the asset, optimal trading arrangements may necessarily conceal the traders ' information. 

Studying such extensions is an interesting avenue for future research.