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Banks lend through syndicates to diversify risk, but co-lending relationships are sticky. This paper finds a “co-lender effect”, namely that banks’ lending volumes are impacted by shocks to co-lenders. We create a new database of cross-border syndicated lending to developing countries from 1993 to 2020. We characterize the network and, as suggested by theory, find both resilience and fragility. Central players propagate shocks, while the impacts of fringe banks are negligible. The global financial crisis and the growth of South-South lenders prompted a decline in network centrality and higher network density with more connections between a declining number of participants. We find further support for a co-lender effect, compounding the sharp fall in lending during the Covid-19 crisis, employing a different methodology.

In this paper, we consider a platform that sells both the first-party product and the third-party product. The product recommendation of such a platform is interpreted as cheap talk, because it is unbinding and costless. We show that if the consumer has the outside option to exit from the platform, there exists a partially revealing communicative equilibrium in which the platform makes a biased recommendation with some positive probability while the consumer follows the platform’s self-referencing recommendation with some probability and takes the outside option to exit from the platform with the remaining probability. In this equilibrium, self-preferencing occurs. Thus, the consumer’s exit option is essential to this self-preferencing equilibrium. We also show that both the platform and the consumer are made better off in this partially revealing self-preferencing equilibrium than in an uninformative equilibrium or without using the search engine. We also extend our arguments to the Hotelling model with consumers’ exit option and draw an interesting policy implication that if a platform’s commission fee is regulated, it can increase the platform’s self-preferencing bias.