Asymmetric Information, Bank Lending, and Implicit Contracts : The Winner's Curse

The purpose of this note is to point out an omission in an important paper by Sharpe (1990) on long-term bank-firm relationships and to provide a correct analysis of the problem. The model studies repeated lending under asymmetric information which leads to winner's-curse type distortions of competition. Contrary to the claims in Sharpe (1990), this game only has an equilibriuim in mixed strategies, which features a partial informational lock-in by firms and random termination of lending relationships