The models I have in mind are the standard “lemons” adverse selection model and other models in which one side doesn’t know something important about the other side’s attributes, for example a government purchaser who doesn’t know if a particular contractor has high costs or low costs. In the lemons model, the market unravels partially or entirely. In the other models, the agent that knows its attributes can earn some “information rents,” which are necessary to get the low-cost agents to reveal the fact that they are low cost. In these models, the uninformed agent does not simply proceed as if it didn’t know it was uninformed, the equilibrium outcome is a product of the fact that both sides know that one side is uninformed. When these models apply, remedying the information asymmetry solves the problem directly. I don’t see how they apply to credit card contracts and other similar examples. Are you saying that they do?
The models I have in mind are the standard “lemons” adverse selection model and other models in which one side doesn’t know something important about the other side’s attributes, for example a government purchaser who doesn’t know if a particular contractor has high costs or low costs. In the lemons model, the market unravels partially or entirely. In the other models, the agent that knows its attributes can earn some “information rents,” which are necessary to get the low-cost agents to reveal the fact that they are low cost. In these models, the uninformed agent does not simply proceed as if it didn’t know it was uninformed, the equilibrium outcome is a product of the fact that both sides know that one side is uninformed. When these models apply, remedying the information asymmetry solves the problem directly. I don’t see how they apply to credit card contracts and other similar examples. Are you saying that they do?