What will you learn in this chapter?
• What information asymmetries are, and why they matter for economic decision making.
– Adverse selection.
– Moral hazard.
• How to differentiate between screening and signaling and describe some applications of each.
• How reputations can help to solve information problems.
• How statistical discrimination might be used to solve information problems.
• The uses and limitations of education and regulation in overcoming information asymmetry problems
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1© 2014 by McGraw‐Hill Education 1
Chapter 10
Information
© 2014 by McGraw‐Hill Education 2
What will you learn in this chapter?
• What information asymmetries are, and why they
matter for economic decision making.
– Adverse selection.
– Moral hazard.
• How to differentiate between screening and signaling
and describe some applications of each.
• How reputations can help to solve information
problems.
• How statistical discrimination might be used to solve
information problems.
• The uses and limitations of education and regulation in
overcoming information asymmetry problems.
© 2014 by McGraw‐Hill Education 3
Information: Knowledge is power
• Many times in economic analyses it is assumed
that individuals are fully informed.
– Individuals have complete information when they are
fully informed about the choices that they and other
relevant economic actors face.
– For example, buyers and sellers understand the quality,
availability, and prices of comparable goods when
engaging in transactions.
• Rarely do individuals have perfectly complete
information.
– Often they have sufficient information to make
acceptable choices.
– Sometimes it may lead to poor outcomes.
2© 2014 by McGraw‐Hill Education 4
Information asymmetry
• When one person knows more than the other
during an agreement, information asymmetry
occurs.
• When one person knows much more than the
other, that person can achieve what he wants
at the other’s expense.
– This occurs only because both parties’ incentives
are not aligned.
– If both parties incentives are aligned, then
information asymmetries do not matter.
© 2014 by McGraw‐Hill Education 5
Information asymmetry
• Two important types of information asymmetry
are:
– Adverse selection: Occurs prior to completing an
agreement when buyers and sellers have different
information about the quality of a good or the riskiness
of a situation.
• Relates to unobserved characteristics.
– Moral hazard: The tendency for people to behave in a
riskier way or to renege on contracts when they do not
face the full consequences of their actions after an
agreement has been made.
• Relates to actions of those involved in the agreement.
© 2014 by McGraw‐Hill Education 6
Adverse selection and the lemons problem
• An example of adverse selection is the lemons
problem in the used‐car market.
– Used car sellers know more about the
characteristics of their cars than potential buyers.
– Test drives won’t necessarily reveal quality of a car.
– Buyers of used cars are aware that they do not
have the same information as the seller.
• Buyers will be suspicious that the car may be a lemon.
• Buyers will not pay as much unless certain of its quality.
– Used car sellers that provide high quality cars are
underpaid.
3© 2014 by McGraw‐Hill Education 7
Adverse selection and the lemons problem
• What happens if sellers refuse to be underpaid?
• If buyers can’t distinguish lemons from high quality cars, the
cars cannot be segmented and only one price exists.
• Sellers of high quality used cars won’t accept less than fair‐
market value for their cars and won’t sell.
• This unravels the market, as buyers perceive average quality
decreasing, and the price lowers; as the price lowers, the
sellers of the next highest quality cars choose to not sell.
• As this process continues, with the price continually falling and
sellers choosing not sell their car, market failure occurs.
© 2014 by McGraw‐Hill Education 8
Active Learning: Combating adverse selection
How is adverse selection combatted in the used car
market?
© 2014 by McGraw‐Hill Education 9
Principal–agent problems and moral hazard
• Asymmetric information can also cause problems after
selection has occurred and two parties have entered an
agreement.
• The problem occurs when one person in the agreement does
not face the full consequences of their actions.
– One example is the principal‐agent problem, when a person called a
principal entrusts someone else, called an agent, with a task.
– Employers (principal) make an agreement with employees (agents) to
do a set of tasks.
– Employees have an incentive to not work as hard as they can.
– Employers may find it costly to monitor employees’ efforts.
• Moral hazard is the tendency for people to behave in a riskier
way or to renege on contracts when they do not face the full
consequences of their actions.
4© 2014 by McGraw‐Hill Education 10
Active Learning: Combating moral hazard
How is moral hazard combatted in the principal‐agent
problem?
© 2014 by McGraw‐Hill Education 11
Solving information problems
• Many information asymmetries can be
rectified.
• The question is whether the cost is worth
acquiring more information.
– Solving information asymmetries may be extremely
costly.
• Many times the cost of obtaining the missing
information is less than the benefit of being
informed.
© 2014 by McGraw‐Hill Education 12
Solving information problems
• There are a few ways to solve information asymmetries.
– Screening: Reveals private information.
– Signaling: Taking action to reveal one’s own private
information.
– Reputation: If interactions occur multiple times, parties can
use their past history to indicate that the other party has
full information.
– Statistical discrimination: Generalizing based on observable
characteristics to fill in missing information.
– Regulation: The government requires information
disclosure or requires participation in a market.
• In all of these solutions, they must not be easily faked.
5© 2014 by McGraw‐Hill Education 13
Summary
• People make decisions based on what they know, but
sometimes they don’t have enough information to
make good decisions.
• One of the key assumptions behind perfect markets is
that individuals have perfect information.
– Information asymmetry can allow one person to take
advantage of another.
– In other cases, markets may fall apart because people are
afraid to trade with one another.
• Problems like adverse selection and moral hazard can
derail what appear to be clever programs or business
models.
– Screening and signaling are among the ways to correct
these inefficiencies.