A seller has an object for sale and can reach buyers only through intermediaries, who also have privileged information about buyers’ valuations. Intermediaries can either mediate the transaction by buying the object and reselling it–the merchant model–or refer buyers to the seller and...

We study an incomplete-information model of sequential bargaining for a single object, with the novel feature that agents are located in a network. In each round of trade, the current owner of the object either consumes it or makes a take-it-or-leave-it offer to some connected trader. Traders...

We investigate the effects of a class of trading protocols on the architecture and efficiency properties of endogenously formed trading networks. In our model, the opportunity to sell valuable objects occurs randomly to different individuals. A sale can only be realized if two individuals are...