Affiliated Common Value Auctions with Differential Information: The Two Bidder Case

I study affiliated, pure common-value auctions with ex-ante asymmetric buyers. For the two-buyer case I characterize and prove uniqueness of the equilibrium of hybrid auctions where the payment is a weighted average of the highest and second-highest bids. A recursive method to explicitly compute the equilibrium is presented. It is shown that any hybrid auction yields at least as much revenue as the first-price auction. In particular, the equilibrium of the second-price auction, obtained in the limit by letting the weight of the highest bid go to zero, revenue-dominates the first-price auction.