Durable Goods Monopoly with Incomplete Information
Lawrence M. Ausubel and Raymond Deneckere
,
4
(
59
)
Review of Economic Studies
795-812
October
1992
Abstract
This article reconsiders the durable goods monopoly problem when the monopolist's marginal cost is private information. We show that the Coase Conjecture implies the No Trade Theorem: In any equilibrium in which the lowest-cost seller's initial offer approaches her marginal cost, the aggregate probability of trade must vanish. However, we also construct non-Coasean equilibria which approximate the unique outcome of the rental version of the same model. These (stationary) equilibria are comparatively efficient.