Detectability, duality, and surplus extraction

Genericity and Robustness of Full Surplus Extraction

Information acquisition and full surplus extraction

It is well-known that when agents’ types are correlated, the mechanism designer can extract the entire surplus. This creates an incentive for agents to acquire information about other agents’ types. Robust lotteries (are payment schemes that) support full extraction and partially robust lotteries support efficient implementation in the presence of information acquisition opportunities. Necessar...

Ex-Post Full Surplus Extraction, Straightforwardly

Consider an estimate of the common value of an auctioned asset that is symmetric in the bidders’types. Such an estimate can be represented solely in terms of the order statistics of those types. This representation forms the basis for a pricing rule yielding truthful bidding as an equilibrium, whether bidders’types are a¢ liated or independent. We highlight the link between the estimator and fu...

Extraction of the Surplus in Standard Auctions

Crémer and McLean [1] and McAfee and Reny [3] showed that, in “nearly all auctions”, the seller can offer a mechanism that obtains full rent extraction. The mechanism designed by Crémer and McLean differs from standard procedures in several respects. Notably, (a) bidders are required to buy “lotteries” in order to partecipate at the auction; (b) bidders are treated non-anonymously, in the sense...

Surplus Extraction on Arbitrary Type Spaces

In this paper I study the possibility of full surplus extraction on arbitrary type spaces, with three main results: (i) I characterize full surplus extraction, (ii) I characterize full surplus extraction assuming that the surplus-extracting allocation is implementable, and (iii) I show that virtually full surplus extraction implies full surplus extraction. The characterizing condition in (ii) a...