Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Information structures in optimal auctions

2007; Elsevier BV; Volume: 137; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/j.jet.2007.02.001

1095-7235

Dirk Bergemann, Martin Pesendorfer,

Optimization and Search Problems

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 information structures in an optimal auction exhibit a number of properties: (i) information structures can be represented by monotone partitions, (ii) the cardinality of each partition is finite, (iii) the partitions are asymmetric across agents. We show that an optimal information structure exists.