Hi! I am a second-year PhD student in Economics at Stanford GSB. I work on microeconomic theory, mechanism design, and market design.
You can reach me at ertang [at] stanford [dot] edu. My CV is here.
Hi! I am a second-year PhD student in Economics at Stanford GSB. I work on microeconomic theory, mechanism design, and market design.
You can reach me at ertang [at] stanford [dot] edu. My CV is here.
In many auctions, bidders may be reluctant to reveal private information to the auctioneer and other bidders. Among deterministic bilateral communication protocols, reducing what bidders learn requires increasing what the auctioneer learns. A protocol implementing a given social choice rule is on the privacy Pareto frontier if no alternative protocol reveals less to both bidders and the auctioneer. For first-price auctions, the descending protocol and the sealed-bid protocol are both on the privacy Pareto frontier. For second-price auctions, the ascending protocol and the ascending-join protocol of Haupt and Hitzig (2025) are both on the privacy Pareto frontier, but the sealed-bid protocol is not. A designer can flexibly trade off between what bidders learn and what the auctioneer learns by "stitching" different protocols together.
We study the effect of providing information to agents who queue before a scarce good is distributed at a fixed time. When agents have quasi-linear utility in time spent waiting, they choose entry times as they would bids in a descending auction. An information designer can influence their behavior by providing updates about the length of the queue. Many natural information policies release sudden bad news, which occurs when agents learn that the queue is longer than previously believed. We show that sudden bad news can cause assortative inefficiency by prompting a mass of agents to simultaneously attempt to join the queue. As a result, if the value distribution has an increasing (decreasing) hazard rate, information policies that release sudden bad news increase (decrease) total surplus, relative to releasing no information. When agents face entry costs to join the queue and the value distribution has a decreasing hazard rate, an information designer maximizes total surplus by announcing only when the queue is full.