Econometrica

Journal Of The Econometric Society

An International Society for the Advancement of Economic
Theory in its Relation to Statistics and Mathematics

Edited by: Guido W. Imbens • Print ISSN: 0012-9682 • Online ISSN: 1468-0262

Econometrica: Jul, 2000, Volume 68, Issue 4

Competing Mechanisms in a Common Value Environment

https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0262.00138
p. 799-837

Bruno Biais, David Martimort, Jean‐Charles Rochet

Consider strategic risk‐neutral traders competing in schedules to supply liquidity to a risk‐averse agent who is privately informed about the value of the asset and his hedging needs. Imperfect competition in this is analyzed as a game in which liquidity suppliers offer trading mechanisms in a decentralized way. Each liquidity supplier behaves as a monopolist facing a residual demand curve resulting from the maximizing behavior of the informed agent and the trading mechanisms offered by his competitors. There exists a unique equilibrium in convex schedules. It is symmetric and differentiable and exhibits typical features of market‐power: Equilibrium trading volume is lower than ex ante efficiency would require. Liquidity suppliers charge positive mark‐ups and make positive expected profits, but these profits decrease with the number of competitors. In the limit, as this number goes to infinity, ask (resp. bid) prices converge towards the upper (resp. lower) tail expectations obtained in Glosten (1994) and expected profits are zero.


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