I develop a theory of intermediation in a market where agents meet bilaterally to trade and buyers cannot commit to payments. Some agents observe the past trading history of traders in the market. These informed agents can secure trades by punishing traders who previously defaulted. The...

Job seekers often face substantial information frictions related to potential job quality. This is especially true in international labor markets, where intermediaries match prospective migrants with employers abroad. We conducted a randomized trial in Indonesia to explore how information about...

We study intermediaries who seek to maximize gains from trade in bilateral negotiations. Intermediaries are players: they cannot commit to act against their objective function and deny, in some cases, trade they believe to be beneficial. This impairs their ability to assist the parties relative...

Die Jobcenter in Deutschland werden entweder als "gemeinsame Einrichtungen" von Kommunen und der lokalen Agentur für Arbeit oder in "Optionskommunen" allein von den Kommunen geführt. Die Umwandlung von 41 gemeinsamen Einrichtungen in Optionskommunen im Jahr 2012 erlaubt es, den Erfolg der...

This paper seeks to examine the nexus between market power and intermediation efficiency in the Kenyan banking system. Using bank-specific, annual balance sheet and profit and loss data for the period 2003-2018, we construct three measures of efficiency; overall efficiency, allocative efficiency...

This research provides evidence on the role of information asymmetry and personal affiliations in housing transactions using a novel dataset that allows observation of detailed information about the property, broker, and seller. Sellers holding a real estate license are found to obtain about 1.6...

We argue that institutional brokerage networks facilitate liquidity provision and mitigate price impact of large non-information motivated trades. Using commission payments, we map trading networks of mutual funds and brokers. We find central funds outperform peripheral funds, especially as...

We argue that post-crisis banking regulations pass through from regulated institutions to unregulated arbitrageurs. We document that, once post-crisis regulations bind post 2014, hedge funds use a larger number of prime brokers and diversify away from GSIB-affiliated prime brokers, and that the...

This study analyzes the business model decision of social platforms with a commerce feature. In practice, social platforms can adopt either an advertising model or a brokerage model. We develop a game-theoretic model to recommend the better business model and investigate the effect of social...

This paper seeks to examine the nexus between market power and intermediation efficiency in the Kenyan banking system. Using bank-specific, annual balance sheet and profit and loss data for the period 2003-2018, we construct three measures of efficiency; overall efficiency, allocative efficiency...

This paper develops a finite-period model of rational bubbles where trade of an asset takes place through a chain of middlemen. We show that there exists a unique equilibrium, and a bubble can occur due to higher-order uncertainty. Under reasonable assumptions, the equilibrium price is...

We analyze agents' decisions to act as producers or intermediaries using equilibrium search theory. Extending previous analyses in various ways, we ask when intermediation emerges and study its efficiency. In one version of the framework, meant to resemble retail, middlemen hold goods, which...

Using a global sample of 2,357 attempted initial coin offerings (ICOs), we examine whether ICO rating providers act as information intermediaries that may reduce information asymmetry and the associated adverse selection problem in the crypto-tokens market. We find that issuer-supplied voluntary...

We show that hedge funds gain an information advantage from their prime broker banks regarding the banks' corporate borrowers. The connected hedge funds make abnormally large trades in the stocks of borrowing firms prior to loan announcements, and these trades outperform other trades. The...

Middlemen are ubiquitous in supply chains. In developing countries they help bring products from remote communities to end markets but may exert strong market power. We study a cooperative intervention which organizes together poor fishing communities in the Amazon -- one of the poorest and most...

We study the ability of competitive coordination service platforms (such as auction sites and real estate agents) to facilitate trade in a directed search model where buyers have unit demands and each seller only has one good to sell. The sellers' capacity constraint leads to a coordination...

In this contribution, I would like to explore the extent to which we can survive in a world without regulatively privileged informational intermediaries, and to the extent that we cannot, whether there are ways to regulate their conduct with a view to improving the utility of their output. I...