In the application of auction theory to the real world, practitioners must choose ex ante which of the common value or the private values paradigm applies. Since intuition may fail, some authors have proposed to decide statistically between the two models. These studies, however, did not confirm...

We show that exchanges of cost information in models with entry may benefit consumers in a wide range of market structures, including multimarket models with independently distributed costs and duopolies. These results contrast with previous findings in models without entry