Innovative activities have public good characteristics in the sense that the cost of producing the innovation is high compared to the cost of producing subsequent units. Moreover, knowledge of how to produce subsequent units is widely known once the innovation has occurred and is, therefore,...

We consider a revenue-maximizing seller who, before proposing a mechanism to sell herobject(s), observes a vector of signals correlated with buyersiacute;valuations. Each buyer knows only the signal that the seller observes about him, but not the signals she observes about other buyers. The...