This paper studies optimal auction design in a private value setting with endogenous information acquisition. First, we develop a general framework for modeling information acquisition when a seller wants to sell an object to one of several potential buyers who can each gather information about...

The theory of market signaling and screening is a cornerstone of the new economics of information. The last two and a half decades have not only witnessed a series of remarkable theoretical developments but also a wide range of applications. This essay examines the key theoretical issues and...

I study the canonical private value auction model for a single good without the quasilinearity restriction. I assume only that bidders are risk averse and the indi- visible good for sale is a normal good. I show that removing quasilinearity leads to qualitatively different solutions to the...

The bursting of the internet bubble continues to have ripple effects on the initial public offering (IPO) process. Critics of this process have fashioned a complex set of interconnected objections to the orthodox bookbuilding method for conducting IPOs, pricing shares, and allocating them to...

It is well-known that the ability of the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism to implement efficient outcomes for private value choice problems does not extend to interdependent value problems. When an agent's type affects other agents' utilities, it may not be incentive compatible for him to...

This paper studies optimal auction design in a private value setting with endogenous information gathering. We develop a general framework for modeling information acquisition when a seller wants to sell an object to one of several potential buyers, who can each gather information about their...

A single unit of a good is to be sold by auction to one of many potential buyers. There are two equally likely states of the world. Potential buyers receive noisy signals of the state of the world. The accuracies of buyers signals may differ. A buyers valuation is the sum of a common value...

We consider a dynamic posted-price mechanism of a seller who must sell a single unit of a good to a number of buyers before a deadline. The seller cannot pre-commit to any price-path. Even when the buyers are symmetric (though non-anonymous) to the seller, the seller can charge different prices...

We study efficient auction design for a single indivisible object when bidders have interdependent values and non-quasilinear preferences. Instead of quasilinearity, we assume only that bidders have positive wealth effects. Our setting nests cases where bidders are ex ante asymmetric, face...

We showed in McLean and Postlewaite (2014) that when agents are informationally small, there exist small modifications to VCG mechanisms in interdependent value problems that restore incentive compatibility. This paper presents a two-stage mechanism that similarly restores incentive...