We study a situation in which an auctioneer wishes to sell an object to one of N risk-neutral bidders with heterogeneous preferences. The auctioneer does not know bidders' preferences but has private information about the characteristics of the object, and must decide how much information to...

This paper studies the relationship between the auctioneer's provision of information and the level of competition in private value auctions. We use a general notion of informativeness which allows us to compare the efficient with the (privately) optimal amount of information provided by the...