Selling with evidence
研究了知情卖方在双边信息不对称交易中如何通过自愿认证信息来设计利润最大化的销售机制，发现当认证陈述足够丰富时存在均衡，且完全信息下的配置可能不是均衡配置。
We study the informed‐principal problem in a bilateral asymmetric information trading setting with interdependent values and quasi‐linear utilities. The informed seller proposes a mechanism and voluntarily certifies information about the good's characteristics. When the set of certifiable statements is sufficiently rich, we show that there is an ex ante profit‐maximizing selling procedure that is an equilibrium of the mechanism proposal game. In contrast to posted price settings, the allocation obtained when product characteristics are commonly known (the unravelling outcome) may not be an equilibrium allocation, even when all buyer types agree on the ranking of product quality. Our analysis relies on the concept of strong Pareto optimal allocation, which was originally introduced by Maskin and Tirole (1990) in private value environments.