What to Put on the Table∗

This paper investigates the circumstances under which negotiating simultaneously over multiple issues or assets helps reduce ineffi ciencies due to the presence of asymmetric information. Consider the case where one agent controls all assets. One would expect that strong substitutabilities among assets, would help trade, as the seller would value the additional units less. We show that this intuition is true only if assets are heterogeneous. If assets are homogeneous, effi ciency is never possible, irrespective of the degree of substitutability or complementarity among them. When ownership is dispersed, in the sense that different assets are owned by different agents, effi ciency is actually more common when assets are homogeneous. When assets are heterogeneous, effi ciency can be possible only when assets are complements. JEL classification codes: C72, D82, L14.