This paper studies optimal auction design in a private value setting with endogenous information acquisition. First, we develop a general framework for modeling information acquisition when a seller wants to sell an object to one of several potential buyers who can each gather information about...

We undertook the first market trading experiments that allowed heterogeneously informed subjects to trade in endogenous time, collecting over 2000 observed trades. Subjects’ decisions were generally in line with the predictions of exogenous-time financial herding theory when that theory is...

We consider an auction environment with interdependent values. Each bidder can learn her payoff type through costly information acquisition. We contrast the socially optimal decision to acquire information with the equilibrium solution in which each agent has to privately bear the cost of...

While herding has long been suspected to play a role in financial market booms and busts, theoretical analyses have struggled to identify conclusive causes for the effect. Recent theoretical work shows that informational herding is possible in a market with efficient asset prices if information...