Gagan Ghosh

Presenter: Gagan Ghosh 

Paper: “Verifiable Private Disclosure in Auctions," joint work with Heng Liu, 

Abstract:  

We study first-price auctions where bidders have independent private values and there is uncertainty regarding the number of bidders or the distribution of valuations. In the benchmark model, the auctioneer knows precisely how much competition bidders will face and can choose to send any verifiable, either public or private, message profile about this to the bidders at no cost. Despite the ability to create informational asymmetries between bidders through private messages, we show that the auctioneer’s information unravels and all bidders are publicly and perfectly informed under the standard regularity condition. If there is uncertainty regarding the seller’s information, then any equilibrium features the Dye evidence information structure. Interestingly, there can be multiple   equilibria with different threshold levels of competition above which information is fully revealed by the informed auctioneer.