The Value of Information Concealment

We consider a revenue optimizing seller selling a single item to a buyer, on whose private value the seller has a noisy signal. We show that, when the signal is kept private, arbitrarily more revenue could potentially be extracted than if the signal is leaked or revealed. We then show that, if the seller is not allowed to make payments to the buyer, the gap between the two is bounded by a multiplicative factor of 3 when the value distribution conditioning on each signal is regular. We give examples showing that both conditions are necessary for a constant bound to hold. We connect this scenario to multi-bidder single-item auctions where bidders’ values are correlated. Similarly to the setting above, we show that the revenue of a Bayesian incentive compatible, ex post individually rational auction can be arbitrarily larger than that of a dominant strategy incentive compatible auction, whereas the two are no more than a factor of 5 apart if the auctioneer never pays the bidders and if each bidder’s value conditioning on the others’ is drawn according to a regular distribution. The upper bounds in both settings degrade gracefully when the distribution is a mixture of a small number of regular distributions.