This paper studies the problem of information provision in auctions. The linkage principle indicates that credibly revealing private information would benefit the seller, which implies that a seller should prefer a public reserve price to a secret one if the reserve price could reveal her...

Sellers benefit on average from revealing information about their goods to buyers, but the incentive to exaggerate undermines the credibility of seller statements. When multiple goods are being auctioned, we show that ordinal cheap talk, which reveals a complete or partial ordering of the...

We develop an empirical methodology to study markets for services. These markets are typically organized as multi-attribute auctions in which buyers take into account seller's price as well as various characteristics, including quality. Our identification and estimation strategies exploit...

The outcome of non-binding reverse auctions critically depends on how information is distributed during the bidding process. We use data from a large European procurement platform to study the impact of different information structures, specifically the availability of quality information to the...

The outcome of non-binding reverse auctions critically depends on how information is distributed during the bidding process. We use data from a large European procurement platform to study the impact of different information structures, specifically the availability of quality information to the...

Do bidders behave as auction theory predicts they should? How do bidders (and thus, prices) react to different types of information? This paper derives implications of auction theory with respect to the dispersion of private information signals in an auction. I conduct a survey of non-bidders to...

Reputation systems constitute an important institution to help sustain trust in online auction markets. However, only half of buyers leave feedback after transactions, and nearly all of it is positive. In this paper, I propose a mechanism whereby sellers can provide rebates (not necessarily in...

In many cases, buyers are not informed about their valuations and rely on experts, who are informed but biased for overbidding. We study auction design when selling to such “advised buyers”. We show that a canonical dynamic auction, the English auction, has a natural equilibrium that...

Online markets have dramatically decreased costs of search and communication for buyers. By contrast, costs of evaluating purchasing alternatives have become critical due to an overwhelming range of available options. When high, evaluation costs can offset potential gains from transactions and...

We study the effect of information disclosure in resolving adverse selection by estimating the demand for a specific type of T-shirt sold on the Yahoo! Auctions platform. To reduce information asymmetry in Internet transactions, sellers usually voluntarily disclose product information by...