Perfect Competition in Dierential Information Economies: Consistency of Incentive Compatibility and Eciency Yeneng Sun and Nicholas C. Yannelis Abstract The idea of perfect competition for an economy with dierential information is formal- ized via an idiosyncratic signal process in which the private signals of almost every individual agent can inuence only a negligible group of agents, and the individual agents’ relevant signals are essentially pairwise independent conditioned on the true states of nature. The existence of incentive compatible, individually rational and Pareto ecient allocations is shown for such a perfectly competitive dierential information economy with or without “common values” via simple measure-theoretic methods. Thus, the conict between in- centive compatibility and Pareto eciency is resolved exactly, and its asymptotic version derived for a sequence of large, but nite private information economies. This work was initiated in October 2003 while Yeneng Sun was visiting the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign. This version was nished in May 2004. Institute for Mathematical Sciences, National University of Singapore, 3 Prince George’s Park, Singapore 118402; also Department of Mathematics, National University of Singapore, 2 Science Drive 2, Singapore 117543. e-mail: matsuny@nus.edu.sg Department of Economics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL 61820. e-mail: nyan- neli@uiuc.edu