Private Information Disclosure in Auctions
نویسندگان
چکیده
This paper provides a novel approach to ordering signals based on the property that more informative signals lead to greater variability of conditional expectations. A new class of precision criteria is defined by combining this approach with different variability orders and its relation with existing criteria of informativeness explored. Then, precision criteria are used to study the incentives of an auctioneer to disclose private information. Using supermodular precision, we obtain three results: (1) a more precise signal yields a more efficient allocation; (2) the auctioneer provides less than the efficient level of information since more information increases bidder informational rents; (3) there is a complementarity between information and competition, so that both the socially efficient and the auctioneer’s optimal choice of precision increase with the number of bidders, and both converge as the number of bidders goes to infinity.
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