We study optimal auctions in a symmetric private values setting, where bidders have signaling concerns: they care about winning the object and a receivers inference about their type. Signaling concerns arise in various economic situations such as takeover bidding, charity auctions, procurement...

We consider a general mechanism design setting where each agent can acquire covert information before participating in the mechanism. The central question is whether a mechanism exists which provides the efficient incentives for information acquisition ex-ante and implements the efficient...

A seller wishes to sell an object to one of multiple bidders. The valuations of the bidders are privately known. We consider the joint design problem in which the seller can decide the accuracy by which bidders learn their valuation and to whom to sell at what price. We establish that optimal...

We study when equilibrium prices can aggregate information in an auction market with a large population of traders. Our main result identifies a property of information—the betweenness property that is both necessary and sufficient for information aggregation. The characterization provides...

We study when equilibrium prices can aggregate information in an auction market with a large population of traders. Our main result identifies a property of information---the betweenness property---that is both necessary and sufficient for information aggregation. The characterization provides...

This paper studies the incentives faced by competing auctioneers who can release information to prospective bidders before bidders choose trading partners. I provide sufficient conditions that ensure the existence of a unique equilibrium in which both sellers release all available information....

We consider a general mechanism design setting where each agent can acquire (covert) information before participating in the mechanism. The central question is whether a mechanism exists which provides the efficient incentives for information acquisition ex-ante and implements the efficient...

We consider common-value hybrid auctions among two asymmetrically informed bidders, where the winning bidder pays his bid with some positive probability k and the losing bid otherwise. Under the assumption of discrete and affiliated signals, we give an explicit characterization of the (unique)...

In many real-life contests, contestants do not know their own type (e.g., value or ability) prior to a competition; and contestants’ types, which are observed privately once entering the contest, are often correlated with each other. We study a two-stage contest in which two players with...

Neeman (2004) and Heifetz and Neeman (2006) have shown that, in auctions with incomplete information about payoffs, full surplus extraction is only possible if agents’ beliefs about other agents are fully informative about their own payoff parameters. They argue that the set of...