Preprint
Sep 2026
The Exact Welfare Guarantee of Fixed-Price Bilateral Trade
A seller and a buyer with independent private values can trade only at a posted price. We determine the worst case of this mechanism exactly: the best posted price always guarantees a $\beta_*=0.738024\ldots$ fraction of first-best welfare, where $\beta_*$ is given in closed form by the root of an explicit equation, th...
Ting-Yi Lin, Yi-Chen Shi, Ke Dong et al.
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