Cake-Eating with Private Information
42 Pages Posted: 24 Nov 2014
Date Written: November 24, 2014
Abstract
We consider a model of cake-eating with private information. The model captures phenomena such as trust and “security of supply” in resource-use relationships. It also predicts supply shocks as an equilibrium phenomenon: privately informed sellers have incentives to reveal resource scarcity too late, through a supply disruption, after which they exploit the consumers’ inability to immediately adjust demand. Two puzzles that a standard exhaustible-resource theory cannot explain are resolved: sellers have an incentive to overstate their resources rather than emphasize scarcity, and consumers can switch to alternatives before exhausting the resource thereby leaving socially valuable resource in the ground.
Keywords: exhaustible resources, asymmetric information, resource dependence
JEL Classification: D400, D900, O330, Q400
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation