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’...