Hidden “junk” fees have the potential to distort competition, creating high costs to consumers. However, regulating them can lead to adverse effects, especially in complex markets with intermediaries where they are most prevalent. To explore the equilibrium adjustments of regulating hidden...

This paper examines intermediation in production networks to unpack the firm attributes and matching costs that govern firm-to-firm networks and the gains from trade. Exploiting rich customs data for Chile, we show that exporters of all sizes use intermediaries, mix trade modes across buyers,...

Economic development is the result of various factors operating in space and time. For some time now, economics has been looking more closely at the role played by institutions as a driving and propelling force behind economic development. More recently, the action carried out by intermediate...

We investigate how to strategically motivate sales agents in intermediary markets. In collaboration with a large travel company, we run a field experiment with more than 1, 200 independently owned intermediaries that sell our study firm's own products as well as products from competitors to end...

Politicians rely on political brokers to buy votes throughout much of the developing world. We investigate how social networks facilitate these vote-buying exchanges. Our conceptual framework suggests brokers should be particularly well-placed within the network to learn about non-copartisans’...

The decentralized nature of blockchain markets has given rise to a complex and highly heterogeneous market structure, gaining increasing importance as traditional and decentralized (DeFi) finance become more interconnected. This paper introduces the DeFi intermediation chain and provides...

Economic development is the result of various factors operating in space and time. For some time now, economics has been looking more closely at the role played by institutions as a driving and propelling force behind economic development. More recently, the action carried out by intermediate...

This study investigates dishonest behavior among cocoa middlemen in Côte d'Ivoire, focusing on the role of observability and financial penalties in deterring such behavior. Using on a modified version of the "die-under-cup task", we examine the cheating behaviors of 151 cocoa middlemen over...

Retail trading platforms have gained popularity in recent years as brokers for ordinary people to trade speculative assets such as stocks and cryptocurrencies. These platforms earn revenue from their users' risky trading and through derivative products, where the platform benefits as the traders...

Responding to frustrations with the enforcement of copyright on YouTube, some creators publish videos that discuss their experiences, challenge claims of infringement, and critique broader structures of content moderation. Platform callouts, or public complaints about the conduct of or on...

The growth of transnational organised crime has been widely perceived as a major national and international security threat. The growth has been facilitated by globalisation, in which people, money, information and goods flow more easily and rapidly across international borders. To take...

To reduce engagement in corruption, firms are increasingly accountable for the behavior of their intermediaries. However, current anti-corruption efforts have not included those agents that arrange the initial meetings between foreign MNEs and potential local partners. We call these initial...

Recent times have witnessed the emergence of a business model where an intermediary sells a subscription plan that covers visits to multiple merchants. Examples abound, with ClassPass, Instacart, and Moviepass being a few prominent ones. The purpose of our study is to put this model under a...

This paper investigates how intermediaries with information advantages divert consumer search in rental markets and lead to inefficient outcomes. Using unique data on tenants’ initial preferences and property-visit records, we find that intermediaries deliberately prioritize the exhibition of...

The role of Middlemen in rural areas is often controversial, mainly because of the positive or negative roles they play in the farmer's livelihood. This paper shows that Middlemen help farmers sell more efficiently, save time identifying dependable purchasers, and provide security because they...

The role of Middlemen in rural areas is often controversial, mainly because of the positive or negative roles they play in the farmer's livelihood. This paper shows that Middlemen help farmers sell more efficiently, save time identifying dependable purchasers, and provide security because they...

The regulatory framework for financial advisors is fragmented, with multiple state and federal regulators. Although prior empirical literature on financial advisors has largely focused on individuals regulated as brokers under FINRA’s primary authority, we define financial advisors by function...

This paper studies the drivers of primary dealers' repo activity and the effect of repo market frictions on bond market liquidity. It separates the two tiers of the bond market, the electronic limit order book (LOB) and the over-the-counter (OTC) market. The results, based on dealer-specific...

Directional bets by short sellers typically forecast future returns, but direct evidence of how other investors acquire information from these bets is nearly nonexistent. Using granular data on the entire Brazilian OTC security lending market and all trades in the Brazilian stock exchange, we...

When brokers, analysts, and fund managers buy or sell stocks for their own accounts, these “access employees” of financial institutions outperform retail investors over short windows up to a month. They earn particularly high abnormal returns when they trade before earnings announcements,...

Brokers have access to order-flow data, which they can use to enhance the returns they earn from short selling. However, brokers also have a fiduciary duty to place their clients’ interests before their own. We test whether brokers exploit their informational advantage and earn larger returns...

We study Bayesian persuasion for a binary decision problem in the presence of a data broker intermediary, who can garble the information she receives to maximize her revenue. We derive several structural properties of the broker's optimal menu under her information constraint, including that...