7 Information Asymmetries on Financial Markets

Abstract

There are two time periods t = 0, 1 and two states in the second period s = 1, 2. There are two consumers i = 1, 2. The first consumer is rich today and poor tomorrow, w ¹ = (1, 0, 0). The second is rich tomorrow and poor today, w ² = (0, 1, 1). There are two Arrow securities, i.e. $A = \begin {pmatrix}1 & 0 \\ 0 & 1\end {pmatrix}$. The first consumer does not know which state occurs and a priori assigns equal probabilities to them. Before trading the asset the second consumer gets a signal revealing the state of the world. Both consumers have ln-utility of wealth, and no time discount rate. All this information is common knowledge. No consumer acts strategically (as if there were two types of infinitely many consumers).