This paper explores the use of auctions for privatizing public assets. In our model, a single ‘insider’ bidder (e.g. incumbent management of a government-owned firm) possesses information about the asset’s risky value. In addition, bidders are privately informed about their costs of...

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 conduct a laboratory experiment of second-price sealed bid auctions of a common value good with two bidders. Bidders face three different types of information: common uncertainty (unknown information), private information (known by one bidder) and public information (known by both bidders),...

We study in the laboratory a series of first price sealed bid auctions of a common value good. Bidders face three types of information: private information, public information and common uncertainty. Auctions are characterized by the relative size of these three information elements. Only half...

We study in the laboratory a series of first price sealed bid auctions of a common value good. Bidders face three types of information: private information, public information and common uncertainty. Auctions are characterized by the relative size of these three information components. According...

The adverse-selection literature has only considered the case in which competing sellers' costs of supply are independent and privately known by the individual sellers. In contrast, the auction literature has ignored adverse selection by implicitly assuming that a bid-taker is indifferent...

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...

This paper shows that in online car auctions, resellers are better at appraising the value of the cars they are bidding on than are consumers. Using a unique data set of online car auctions, I show that differences in bidding behavior between resellers and consumers can be explained by...

We investigate the relevance of conditional reasoning and belief formation for the occurrence of the winner's curse with the help of two experimental manipulations. First, we compare results from a very simple common-value auction game with results from a transformed version of this game that...

This paper explores the use of auctions for privatizing public assets. In our model, a single insider bidder (e.g., incumbent management of a government-owned firm) possesses information about the asset's risky value. In addition, bidders are privately informed about their costs of exploiting...