Reputational Bidding

We consider auctions where bidders care about the reputational effects of their bidding and argue that the amount of information that is disclosed at the end of the auction will influence bidding. Our analysis focuses on several bid disclosure rules that capture all of the realistic cases. We show that bidders distort their bidding in a way that conforms to stylized facts about takeovers/licence auctions. Also, we rank the disclosure rules in terms of the expected revenues they generate and find that, under certain conditions, full disclosure will not be optimal.