In this work we study an agent based model to investigate the role of asymmetric information degrees for market evolution. This model is quite simple and may be treated analytically since the consumers evaluate the quality of a certain good taking into account only the quality of the last good purchased plus her perceptive capacity beta. As a consequence, the system evolves according to a stationary Markov chain. The value of a good offered by the firms increases along with quality according to an exponent alpha, which is a measure of the technology. It incorporates all the technological capacity of the production systems such as education, scientific development and techniques that change the productivity rates. The technological level plays an important role to explain how the asymmetry of information may affect the market evolution in this model. We observe that, for high technological levels, the market can detect adverse selection. The model allows us to compute the maximum asymmetric information degree before the market collapses. Below this critical point the market evolves during a limited period of time and then dies out completely. When beta is closer to 1 (symmetric information), the market becomes more profitable for high quality goods...

Este trabalho apresenta três extensões ao modelo de reputação proposto por Shapiro (1983). A primeira torna o modelo original mais adequado para avaliar o problema de informação assimétrica de bens de busca e bens credenciais, a segunda permite identificar o ganho de eficiência gerado pela inclusão de um sistema de informação adicional e, a terceira mostra que a provisão de um volume maior de informação pode gerar efeitos adversos quando o produto em questão possui vários atributos. Em seguida, os desenvolvimentos teóricos são utilizados para avaliar os efeitos da introdução do Exame Nacional de Cursos sobre o mercado de cursos superiores do Brasil. Algumas das predições do modelo são testadas empiricamente, fornecendo indicações de que este Exame possui um papel relevante para mitigar o problema de informação identificado neste mercado.; This essay presents three extensions to the model first proposed by Shapiro (1983) regarding reputation. The first extension adjusts Shapiro’s original model in order to make it more suitable in dealing with the problem of asymmetric information of search goods and credence goods. The second one allows the identification of the efficiency gains obtained after the inclusion of an additional information system...

Este trabalho investiga como os modelos de comunicação e informação podem contribuir para analisar o relacionamento entre empresas pertencentes à rede de cooperação e seus fornecedores. O foco da pesquisa limita-se aos modelos de assimetria de informação, tais como: teoria do agente e principal, seleção adversa e risco moral. Esses conceitos são importantes para mostrar os problemas que podem vir a ocorrer nas transações entre compradores e vendedores. Com o intuito de minimizar esses problemas, este trabalho se propõe a analisar o impacto da tecnologia de informação (TI) na redução das assimetrias de informação. O enfoque será na análise do comércio eletrônico entre empresas (B2B), especificamente, os e-marketplaces verticais. Por fim, é apresentado um estudo de caso no setor da construção civil em que algumas das maiores construtoras brasileiras têm como proposta compartilhar custos e riscos para o desenvolvimento de um e-marketplace. A conclusão da pesquisa é de que a abordagem de redes de cooperação, incorporada ao uso adequado de ferramentas de TI permite diminuir as assimetrias de informação e conseqüentemente fortalecem o poder de compra das empresas que compõem à rede; This work investigates how the information and communication models can contribute to analyze the relationship among enterprises from cooperation network and their suppliers. The focus of research is limited to asymmetric information models...

Desde os trabalhos de Modigliani e Miller (1958, 1963), os estudos sobre a estrutura de financiamento das empresas ganharam impulso sem, contudo, desenvolver-se num horizonte único. Pelo contrário, novas linhas de pesquisa foram desenvolvidas, com previsões teóricas sendo comumente testadas empiricamente. Neste sentido, este trabalho busca avançar neste campo de estudo, a fim de promover alguma contribuição acerca do entendimento da estrutura de capital das empresas. Em especial, este trabalho adota a abordagem relacionada com a assimetria de informação entre provedores de recursos (credores e acionistas) e os gestores dessas empresas. Adota-se a governança corporativa (G.C.) como um meio de minorar os efeitos dessa assimetria informacional pois, uma das premissas pelas boas práticas de G.C. é a redução de assimetria de informação entre os financiadores e os tomadores de recursos na empresa. Pela aplicação de um método de verificação empírico em uma amostra de empresas brasileiras de capital aberto, encontraram-se evidências de que a G.C. atua como um meio de acesso a outras fontes de financiamento, pois as empresas com melhores práticas de G.C. apresentaram menor endividamento. Entretanto, os resultados apresentam sensibilidade à técnica estatística utilizada...

Esse trabalho tem por objetivo analisar a sensibilidade do investimento ao fluxo de caixa de 356 firmas brasileiras de capital aberto no período de 1997-2010, considerando a estrutura de propriedade e controle. As firmas são classificadas a priori entre subinvestimento e superinvestimento, e reagrupadas conforme o nível de oportunidades de investimento do setor industrial. Com uma versão do modelo acelerador de investimento, estimado pelo método GMM System, o estudo mostra que essa sensibilidade poderia sinalizar oportunidades de investimento, problemas de agência do fluxo de caixa livre e problemas de assimetria de informação. Particularmente, discute-se que o superinvestimento pode ser oriundo tanto dos problemas de agência do fluxo de caixa livre quanto ser uma sinalização ao mercado do volume de oportunidades de investimento. Além disso, também é investigado se firmas com controle familiar, estruturadas como pirâmides e pirâmides controladas por família têm influência sobre o volume de recursos próprios aplicados para financiar os investimentos. As estimativas mostram que os investimentos das firmas consideradas com subinvestimento e grandes oportunidades de investimento podem não ser sensíveis ao fluxo de caixa quando o excesso de direito de voto sobre o direito de propriedade do maior acionista é baixo. Por outro lado...

Most policies for pricing pollution under asymmetric information proposed in the literature to date are rarely--if ever--used in practice. This is likely due to their complexity. We investigate the scope for using somewhat simpler policies that are more closely related to pricing schemes already used by regulators in many jurisdictions. These schemes have a discrete block pricing (DBP) structure whereby a given unit price for pollution is applied up to a specified level of pollution for any given polluter, and a higher unit price is applied to any pollution from that polluter above the specified level. If the same price schedule is applied uniformly to all firms, we call it UDBP. We derive the optimal UDBP schedule for any given number of price blocks. We also derive the optimal limiting case of the UDBP schedule (with an infinite number of price blocks) as a uniform linear increasing marginal price schedule (ULIMP). The optimal ULIMP scheme strikes a balance between the information-related benefits of increasing marginal prices on one hand, and an increase in aggregate abatement cost, due to the non-equalization of marginal abatement costs across firms, on the other. In particular, the optimal schedule is steeper with larger aggregate uncertainty about marginal abatement costs...

This paper examine asymmetric information about migrant earnings and its implications for remittance behavior using a sample of Indian households with husbands working overseas in Qatar. On average, wives underreport their husbands’ income and underreporting is more prevalent in households with higher earning migrants. The discrepancy in earning reports is strongly correlated with variation in remittances: greater underreporting by wives is associated with lower remittances. An exchange model of remittances is developed with asymmetric information and costly state verification. The optimal remittance contract prescribes a threshold for remittances that invites verification only if unmet. The model’s predictions closely match our empirical findings.

We study the relationship between the set of rational expectations equilibrium allocations and the ex-post core of exchange economies with asymmetric information.

We show that under standard assumptions a Tullock contest with asymmetric information has a pure strategy Bayesian equilibrium. Moreover, two-player common-value Tullock contests in which one of the players has an information advantage have a unique equilibrium. In equilibrium both players exert the same expected effort, and although the player with information advantage wins the prize with probability less than one-half, his payoff is greater or equal to that of his opponent. In common-value Tullock contests with more players any information advantage is rewarded, but the other properties of two players contests do not hold; Moreno gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, grant ECO2011-­‐29762

This article presents a game theoretical model of union organization that highlights the role played by efficiency and asymmetric information as determinants of unionization and questions commonly held assumptions about the effect of firm profitability on unionization decisions. In the model, employers set wages taking into account the effect of their choices on workers' incentives to unionize. As a result of employers' strategic wage setting, collective bargaining emerges in equilibrium only if it increases surplus or if there is asymmetric information about the consequences of unionization. While unionization is usually assumed to be more likely in more profitable firms, the model shows that the probability of unionization will be higher in firms with lower rents. It also shows that the union wage premium and unionization will tend to be negatively correlated.; The financial support of Spain's Ministry of Education and Science (SEJ2005-06655/ECON) is gratefully acknowledged.

Accommodating asymmetric information in a dynamic asset pricing model is technically challenging due to the problems associated with higher-order expectations. That is, rational investors are forced into a situation where they must forecast the forecasts of other agents. In a dynamic setting, this problem telescopes into the infinite future and the dimension of the relevant state space approaches infinity. By using the frequency domain approach of Whiteman (1983) and Kasa (2000), this paper demonstrates how information structures previously believed to preserve asymmetric information in equilibrium, converge to a symmetric information, rational expectations equilibrium. The revealing aspect of the price process lies in the invertibility of the observed state space, which makes it possible for agents to infer the economically fundamental shocks and thus eliminating the need to forecast the forecasts of others.

The home equity bias is one of the many puzzles existing in international finance. This puzzle is characterized by the concentration of domestic equity in any investor's portfolio, which is in contradiction with the benchmark of full diversification in a world mutual fund. Based on Admati's (1985) and Gehrig's (1993) noisy rational expectation models, the author tries to explain the effect of asymmetric information in the home equity bias puzzle. While asymmetric information helps to explain the puzzle for the case of one domestic, and one foreign equity, this result relies on very restrictive assumptions. Using a model with one domestic asset and two foreign assets, the author illustrates that asymmetries of information are also consistent with home equity bias reversals. One proposition generalizes these results. Simulations corroborate the main theoretical predictions of the model presented by the author.

We conducted a field experiment in Southern Ghana to test the effect of asymmetric information on intrahousehold allocation. A lottery was conducted, where prizes were distributed in public and in private. The results indicate that asymmetric information over windfalls has a differential effect on observable and concealable expenses, consistent with hiding. Husbands' public windfalls increase investment in assets and social capital, while there is no such effect when wives win. Private windfalls of both spouses are committed to cash (wives) or in-kind gifts (husband) which are either difficult to monitor or to reverse if discovered by the other spouse.

Asymmetric information has crucial implications for various market participants in financial markets, including investors (local and foreign), firms, and governments. The information asymmetry problem is especially severe in emerging markets. My dissertation attempts to address a few information-related questions that interest both academicians and practitioners. The first study adds some new evidence to the on-going debate of whether local or foreign investors are better informed. I offer a new perspective to the issue by examining two market segments within one country but separated by the relevance of local knowledge measured by state ownership. I find that state ownership has a dramatic asymmetric effect on local and foreign institutional investors in China’s stock market. Local (foreign) institutional investors have an informational advantage in state-owned enterprises (SOEs), while foreign institutional investors have an informational advantage in non-state-owned enterprises (non-SOEs). Moreover, the informational advantage of local institutional investors is less evident in SOEs with high board independence and better audit quality. Building on these results, the second study further uses local and foreign institutional ownership as a measure of private information and examines whether firm-specific return volatility proxies for price informativeness. I find firm-specific return volatility is positively related to private information. Therefore the results support the notion that firm-specific return volatility measures the rate of private information impounded into stock prices. My research contributes to the literature in at least four important ways. My findings reconcile the two opposing views on local and foreign investors in the literature and suggest that the informational advantages of local and foreign investors vary with the relevance of local knowledge. Examining only the whole market in past research masks important variation in the relative advantages of local and foreign investors in market segments within a country. My study also suggests that taking into account firm-level characteristics...

This paper studies construction of facilities in a federal state under asymmetric information. A country consists of two regions, each ruled by a local authority. The federal government plans to construct a facility in one of the regions. The facility generates a local value in the host region and has spillover effects in the other region. The federal government does not observe the local value because it is the local authority's private information. 80 the federal governrnent designs an incentive-compatible mechanism, specifying if the facility should be constructed and a balanced scheme of interregional transfers to finance its cost. The federal governrnent is constitutionally constrained to respect a given leveI of each region's welfare. We show that depending upon the facility's local value and the spillover effect, the governrnent faces different incentive problems. Moreover, their existence depends crucially on how stringent constitutional constraints are. Therefore, the optimal mechanism will also depend upon these three features of the model.

Neste trabalho é analisada a relação entre um regulador e uma empresa petrolífera. Há várias incertezas inerentes à essa relação e o trabalho se concentra nos efeitos da assimetria de informação. Fazemos a caracterização da regulação ótima sob informação assimétrica, quando o regulador deve desenhar um mecanismo que induz a firma a revelar corretamente sua informação privada. No caso em que a rma não pode se comprometer a não romper o acordo, mostramos que o regulador pode não implementar o resultado ótimo que é obtido sob informação completa. Nesse caso, o regulador não consegue compartilhar os riscos com a firma de forma ótima. Por fim, é apresentado um exemplo, em que mostramos que a condição de Spence-Mirrlees (SMC) pode não valer. Esse resultado aparece de forma natural no modelo.; This work considers a relationship between a regulator and an oil company. There are many uncertainties inherent in this relationship and we focus on the e ects of asymmetric information. We characterize the optimal regulation under asymmetric information, when the regulator must design a mechanism that induces truthful revelation about the rm's private information. We show that, when the rm cannot commit not to quit the relationship...

Loans are illiquid assets that can be sold in a secondary market even that buyers have no certainty about their quality. I study a model in which a lender has access to new investment opportunities when all her assets are illiquid. To raise funds, the lender may either borrow using her assets as collateral, or she can sell them in a secondary market. Given asymmetric information about assets quality, the lender cannot recover the total value of her assets. There is then a role for the government to correct the information problem using fiscal tools.

Trabajo publicado como artículo en Journal of Regulatory Economics 23(2): 125-144 (2003).-- http://dx.doi.org/10.1023/A:1022202929469; We study the outcomes of experimental multi-unit uniform and discriminatory auctions with demand uncertainty. Our study is motivated by the ongoing debate about market design in the electricity industry. Our main aim is to compare the effect of asymmetric demand-information between sellers on the performance of the two auction institutions. In our baseline conditions all sellers have the same information, whereas in our treatment conditions some sellers have better information than others. In both information conditions we find that average transaction prices and price volatility are not significantly different under the two auction institutions. However, when there is asymmetric information among sellers the discriminatory auction is significantly less efficient. These results are not in line with the typical arguments made in favor of discriminatory pricing in electricity industries; namely, lower consumer prices and less price volatility. Moreover, our results provide some indication that discriminatory auctions reduce technical efficiency relative to uniform auctions.

Em dezembro de 2000, a Bolsa de Valores de São Paulo (Bovespa) criou uma listagem em que diferenciava as empresas que voluntariamente aceitassem práticas de governança corporativa adicionais àquelas exigidas pela Comissão de Valores Mobiliários (CVM). A finalidade da inovação era estreitar a relação entre as empresas e os seus investidores, diminuindo a assimetria informacional e dando maior segurança ao investidor. O objetivo neste artigo é testar os efeitos gerados por essa iniciativa sobre a informação assimétrica do mercado acionário. Para tanto, foi realizado um estudo de eventos tendo como variável central a política de dividendos. O resultado revela que as companhias que aderiram aos mercados com graus diferenciados de governança apresentam menores graus de informação assimétrica e, desse modo, inseriram-se em um ambiente institucional mais seguro. Em outras palavras, a iniciativa da Bovespa teve êxito ao mitigar o problema da informação assimétrica no mercado acionário brasileiro.; En diciembre de 2000, la Bolsa de Valores de São Paulo (Bovespa) creó una lista en la que diferenciaba a las empresas que aceptasen voluntariamente nuevas prácticas de gobierno corporativo, además de aquellas que ya exigía la Comissão de Valores Mobiliários (CVM). El objetivo de la innovación era estrechar la relación entre las empresas y sus inversores...

This study investigates supply chain cooperative management problem. In this study, based on principal-agent, firstly we analyses cooperative management factors in supply chain including leading enterprise expected utilities, subsidiary enterprise expected incomes and leading enterprise agency cost, then the incentive contract model is constructed; Secondly the model is solved in the case of symmetric information and asymmetric information; At last, in order to make clear of the model, this paper does mathematical analysis of leading enterprise expected utilities, subsidiary enterprise expected incomes and leading enterprise agency cost. Some important conclusions are obtained: subsidiary enterprise ability, cost coefficient, absolute risk aversion factor and output variance has the same influence on leading enterprise expected utilities and subsidiary enterprise expected incomes; subsidiary enterprise ability, cost coefficient has the same influence on leading enterprise expected utilities, subsidiary enterprise expected incomes and leading enterprise agency cost; leading enterprise expected utilities and subsidiary enterprise expected incomes become bigger and bigger, but leading enterprise agency cost becomes smaller and smaller with absolute risk aversion factor and output variance decreased. etc. Leading enterprise can take on incentive measures (improving subsidiary enterprise ability...