original papers: Who else is bidding? The Pareto optimality of disclosing bidder identities

Gopal Das Varma ()
Additional contact information
Gopal Das Varma: Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, Box 90120, Durham, NC 27708, USA

Review of Economic Design, 2002, vol. 7, issue 2, 155-171

Abstract: This paper examines whether the seller of an object should reveal the identities of the participating bidders before bids become due. It is shown that when bidders experience identity dependent externalities and auction participation is exogenous, then for a large class of standard auction mechanisms, a policy of revelation serves to realize a higher surplus because it improves the accuracy of each bidder's estimate of her ex-post willingness-to-pay, and therefore changes the auction allocation in a more ex-post efficient manner. Furthermore, it is shown that the policy of revelation increases both the expected seller revenues as well as ex-ante expected bidder payoffs.

Keywords: Auction; externalities; efficiency; mechanism design (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D44 D61 D62 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2002-10-09
Note: Received: 4 February 2000 / Accepted: 15 November 2000
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.de/link/service/journals/10058/papers/2007002/20070155.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:reecde:v:7:y:2002:i:2:p:155-171

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10058

Access Statistics for this article

Review of Economic Design is currently edited by Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Fuhito Kojima and Tilman Börgers

More articles in Review of Economic Design from Springer, Society for Economic Design
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().