A number of recent results in mechanism design literature show that in virutally all mechanism design environments of interest, as long as agents' private information is correlated. It is possible to design mechanisms that leave agents with arbitrarily small information rents. Thus, while agents...

We study the performance of English and second price auctions in which the seller sets an optimal reserve price given his beliefs. We define the effectivess of an auction as the ration between the expected revenue it generated for the seller and the expected valuation of the object to the bidder...

We present a model of social learning in an environment with common values where informational cascades and herding arise in combination with the winner ; s curse. A informational cascades and herding arise in combination with the winner's curse. A seller of an object sequentially obtains bids...