Douglas Gale’s contribution to bargaining and markets

This short piece reviews some of the seminal contributions by Douglas Gale to the study of decentralized markets, both with symmetric information and with adverse selection. A key driver of Gale s interest in these themes was the aim to provide non cooperative foundations to competitive markets. The goal of this piece is not to provide a comprehensive survey, but to highlight some key insights and results in Gale s work in this area and to emphasize their relationship with the subsequent developments in the literature on decentralized markets and its various applications to OTC markets, labor markets, money and more.