Conferences at Department of Economics, University of Toronto, Canadian Economic Theory Conference 2013

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Trading Dynamics in the Market for Lemons

Ayca Kaya*, Kyungmin Kim

Last modified: 2013-04-15

Abstract


We study a dynamic lemons market where randomly arriving uninformed buyers, prior to making take-it-or-leave-it price oers, observe a private noisy signal of the true quality of the object as well as the length of time since the object rst arrived on the market. We characterize the unique equilibrium of this model. Depending on the prior belief about the quality of the object for sale, the equilibrium beliefs may be constant, increasing or declining over time. A priori, longer time on the market may result from unfavorable signals received by previous buyers, indicating lower quality, or it may result from a high reservation value of the seller, indicating high quality. We show that, in equilibrium, when the initial belief is high, the former effect dominates the latter, and beliefs decline over time, while if the initial belief is low, the latter effect dominates the former and the beliefs increase over time. We also undertake a series of comparative static exercises, and in particular show that increased quality of the buyer's signal may lead to an increase or a decrease in the expected delay to trade.


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