Ths authors consider a first-price auction when the ranking of bidders' private valuations is common knowledge among bidders. This new informational framwork is motivated by several applications, from procurement to privatization. It induces a particular asymmetric auction model with affiliated...

First and second price collusive auction mechanisms from the literature on bid rigging within the independent private values model are extended to be applicable within the general symmetric model where signals are affiliated. A mechanism which allow information sharing is also proposed. The...

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 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...

We present new conditions that guarantee the existence of mechanism with a unique or essentially unique equilibrium in auction and public goods problems with quasi-linear utility functions. These conditions bear only on the information structures of the agents.