The Journal of Finance

The Journal of Finance publishes leading research across all the major fields of finance. It is one of the most widely cited journals in academic finance, and in all of economics. Each of the six issues per year reaches over 8,000 academics, finance professionals, libraries, and government and financial institutions around the world. The journal is the official publication of The American Finance Association, the premier academic organization devoted to the study and promotion of knowledge about financial economics.

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A Comparison of Centralized and Fragmented Markets with Costly Search

Published: 05/03/2005   |   DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6261.2005.00770.x

XIANGKANG YIN

How does quotation transparency affect financial market performance? Biais's irrelevance proposition in 1993 shows that centralized markets yield the same expected bid–ask spreads as fragmented markets, other things equal. However, de Frutos and Manzano demonstrated in 2002 that expected spreads in fragmented markets are smaller and market participants prefer to trade in fragmented markets. This paper introduces liquidity traders' costs of searching for a better quote into the Biais model and derives opposite conclusions to these previous studies: expected spreads in centralized markets are smaller and liquidity traders prefer centralized markets, while market makers prefer fragmented markets.