Consumer-tracking technology offers new tools for price discrimination in digital markets. We examine the impact of sellers using this technology to adjust prices according to a buyer’s prior search length in a competitive search market where buyers differ in their patience. We find a “Coasian equilibrium” wherein sellers reduce prices for buyers with longer search lengths which in turn requires them to reduce prices for buyers with shorter search lengths. There is a Coasian equilibrium that not only yields higher welfare for every buyer than all uniform-pricing equilibria, but is also the unique symmetric equilibrium when some mass of buyers are arbitrarily patient.

This paper analyzes the “integrative” aspect of bargaining, in which the bargaining parties attempt to reconcile their interests. The model consists of two phases. In the integrative phase, the bargainers receive information about the bargaining surplus. If any of the bar-gainers stop learning, then the distributive phase occurs in which the bargainers divide the surplus via standard random-proposer bargaining. We show that even with an arbitrarily small cost of learning, the integrative phase disappears if bargainers’ outside options are sufficiently asymmetric. We also investigate the optimal choice of information structure in the integrative phase. Contrary to public belief, the information structure focusing on the downside loss is only sometimes optimal.

In markets where buyers and sellers are uncertain about whether others are informed about the quality of an asset, inefficiency in trading arises due to incomplete learning. As the seller's willingness to sell depends on quality, an informed buyer who knows quality is high has a strategic incentive to hide her private information by bidding low and pooling with a buyer who knows quality is low or is uninformed. This pooling incentive is strengthened by the uninformed buyer's unwillingness to bid high as she faces a loss when the competing buyer knows quality is low. The seller who is informed quality is high and the uninformed seller may not be willing to sell at these low pooling bids leading to trading inefficiency. We outline conditions under which the asset is not traded despite the gains form trade even when all traders are symmetrically informed or uninformed.

Asymmetric information about product quality can create incentives for a privately informed manufacturer to sell to uninformed consumers through a retailer and to maintain secrecy of upstream pricing. By delegating retail price setting to an intermediary the manufacturer can hide information about product quality, prevent double marginalization and avoid signaling distortions associated with direct selling. For intermediated signaling games of this sort, we outline a notion of equilibrium refinement that is motivated by considerations similar to the Intuitive Criterion for standard signaling games and show that under delegated selling pooling outcomes are consistent with the new refinement. Expected profit, consumer surplus and social welfare can all be higher with delegated selling. However, if secrecy of upstream pricing cannot be maintained, selling through a retailer can only lower the expected profit of the manufacturer.