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...

How much information does an auctioneer want bidders to have in a private value environment? We address this question using a novel approach to ordering information structures based on the property that in private value settings more information leads to a more disperse distribution of buyers’...

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...

A celebrated result in auction theory is that the optimal reserve price in the standard private value setting does not depend on the number of bidders. We modify the framework by considering that the seller controls the accuracy with which bidders learn their valuations, and show that in such a...

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 ob ject, and must decide how much information to...

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...