Bilateral trade with a benevolent intermediary
研究了在双边谈判中，无法事先承诺的中介如何最大化贸易收益，分析了其面临的信用约束和沟通策略。
We study intermediaries who seek to maximize gains from trade in bilateral negotiations. Intermediaries are players: they cannot commit to act against their objective function and deny, in some cases, trade they believe to be beneficial. This impairs their ability to assist the parties relative to conventional mechanisms. We analyze this limited commitment environment as a standard mechanism design problem with an additional “credibility” constraint, requiring that every outcome be interim‐optimal conditional on available information. We investigate how such intermediaries communicate with the parties, analyze the tradeoffs they face, and study the bounds on what they can achieve.