When players' affiliated values are symmetrically distributed, expected revenue in the second-price auction equals or exceeds that in the first-price auction (Milgrom and Weber, 1982). We provide two common-value examples where this ranking fails when players are asymmetrically informed.

Equilibrium strategies are explicitly derived for a family of two-bidder common-value first-price auctions in which players have ex ante different information represented by finite partitions of the set of possible values for the object being sold. The distribution of bids for the ex post strong...