Credible sales mechanisms and intermediaries
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2007-03-01
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We consider a seller who faces several buyers and lacks access to an institution to credibly close a sale. If buyers anticipate that the seller may negotiate further, they will prefer to wait before making their best and final offers. This in turn induces the seller to bargain at length with buyers, even if doing so is costly. When the seller's cost of soliciting another round of offers is either very large or very small, the seller credibly commits to an auction and experiences negligible bargaining costs. Otherwise, there may be several rounds of increasing offers and significant seller losses. In these situations, an intermediary with a sufficiently valuable reputation and/or weak marginal incentives regarding price can create value by credibly committing to help sell the object without delay.
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McAdams, D, and M Schwarz (2007). Credible sales mechanisms and intermediaries. American Economic Review, 97(1). pp. 260–276. 10.1257/aer.97.1.260 Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/1729.
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David McAdams
David McAdams is Professor of Business Administration at the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University. He is also Professor of Economics in the Economics Department at Duke. He earned a B.S. in Applied Mathematics at Harvard University, an M.S. in Statistics from Stanford University, and a Ph.D. in Business from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Before joining the faculty at Duke, he was Associate Professor of Applied Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He has also worked as Special Assistant to the Director, Bureau of Economics, Federal Trade Commission.
Professor McAdams' primary research interests are microeconomic theory and game theory, with a special focus on strategic interactions between buyers and sellers, including auctions, pricing, negotiations, and relationships. His work has been published in the leading journals of economics, including Econometrica, American Economic Review, Review of Economic Studies, Journal of Political Economy, Journal of Economic Theory, and Journal of Econometrics. Currently, he is an associate editor of Journal of Economic Literature, International Journal of Industrial Organization, and International Journal of Game Theory.
Professor McAdams is author of "Game-Changer: Game Theory and the Art of Transforming Strategic Situations" (W.W. Norton, 2014).
Professor McAdams teaches the economics elective "Game Theory for Strategic Advantage" in the Daytime MBA program at Fuqua, as well as the PhD elective "Market Design I: Auctions" in the Economics Department.
Professor McAdams' consulting work focuses on two areas: (i) “market design / bidding strategy consulting” for those designing or participating in an auction market (e.g. FCC spectrum auctions, electricity procurement auctions, B2B exchanges); and (ii) “game-theory consulting” for firms (from startup to Fortune 50) facing mission-critical strategic challenges or opportunities.
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