The value of information for auctioneers

Marcus Hagedorn

Journal of Economic Theory, 2009, vol. 144, issue 5, pages 2197-2208

Abstract: An auctioneer wants to sell an indivisible object to one of multiple bidders, who have private information about their valuations of the object. A bidder's information structure determines the accuracy with which the bidder knows her private valuation. The main result of the paper is that the auctioneer's revenue is a convex function of bidders' information structures. One implication is that assigning asymmetric information structures instead of symmetric information structures to bidders is always revenue-enhancing. This paper generalizes a result of Bergemann and Pesendorfer [D. Bergemann, M. Pesendorfer, Information structures in optimal auctions, J. Econ. Theory 137 (2007) 580-609], who show that revenue-maximizing information structures are asymmetric.

Keywords: Endogenous; information; Mechanism; design; Asymmetric; information; structures; Common; values (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009

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Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jetheo:v:144:y:2009:i:5:p:2197-2208

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