In the history of alleged manipulations on forward markets, it has been observed that high prices resulted from a cartel's long positions. The present paper addresses this issue in a simple model of price setting duopolists. We show that forward trading results in producers buying forward their own production, so that equilibrium prices are increased compared to the case without forward trading. This result contrasts with the social desirability of forward markets emphasized by the academic literature.

This article studies the role of pricing as a signal of environmental performance for polluting products to green consumers. It is shown that high environmental performance is signaled through a high price when less polluting products are more costly to produce. Consequently, the level of pollution is distorted downward relative to what would prevail under full information.

No abstract

Environmental performance, Experience good, Green product, Pollution, Quality, Signaling, D42, D82, L15, Q50,

er mars 2004Résumé I show that the presence of informed buyers is necessary but not always sucient for producers to use prices as signals of product quality.A suciently high fraction of informed buyers eliminates the lemons problem. A small fraction of informed buyers mitigates the lemons problem, provided that buyers' prior belief of high quality is suciently pessimistic : price reveals high quality at a signaling cost which increases with market power. However, if buyers' prior belief of high quality is optimistic when the market is poorly informed, then the lemons problem is not overcome.