Efficient Competition through Cheap Talk: Competing Auctions and Competitive Search without Ex Ante Price

Philipp Kircher and Kyungmin Kim

No 2013-107, SIRE Discussion Papers from Scottish Institute for Research in Economics (SIRE)

Abstract: We consider a frictional two-sided matching market in which one side uses public cheap talk announcements so as to attract the other side. We show that if the first-price auction is adopted as the trading protocol, then cheap talk can be perfectly informative, and the resulting market outcome is efficient, constrained only by search frictions. We also show that the performance of an alternative trading protocol in the cheap-talk environment depends on the level of price dispersion generated by the protocol: If a trading protocol compresses (spreads) the distribution of prices relative to the first-price auction, then an efficient fully revealing equilibrium always (never) exists. Our results identify the settings in which cheap talk can serve as an efficient competitive instrument, in the sense that the central insights from the literature on competing auctions and competitive search continue to hold unaltered even without ex ante price commitment.

Keywords: Directed search; competitive search; commitment; cheap talk (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-cta, nep-ger and nep-mic
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:edn:sirdps:532

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