Entry Proofness and Market Breakdown under Adverse Selection

This paper studies competitive allocations under adverse selection. We first provide a general necessary and sufficient condition for entry on an inactive market to be unprofitable. We then use this result to characterize, for an active market, a unique budget-balanced allocation implemented by a market tariff making additional trades with an entrant unprofitable. Motivated by the recursive structure of this allocation, we finally show that it emerges as the essentially unique equilibrium outcome of a discriminatory ascending auction. These results yield sharp predictions for competitive nonexclusive markets.