An optimal auction with correlated values and risk aversion

We consider an auction setting where the buyers are risk averse with correlated private valuations (CARA preferences, binary types), and characterize the optimal mechanism for a risk neutral seller. We show that the optimal auction extracts all buyer surplus whenever the correlation is sufficiently strong (greater than 1/3 in absolute value), no matter how risk averse the buyers are. In contrast, we note that a sufficiently risk-averse seller would not use a full rent extracting mechanism for any positive correlation of the valuations even if the buyers were risk neutral. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: D43, D81