Séminaire NANCY – Oliver Bos (ENS Paris Saclay)

Détails de l'événement :

!!! Annulé !!! Le séminaire sera reprogrammé à une date ultérieure.

“Auctions with Signaling Bidders: Optimal Design and Information Disclosure” avec Martin Pollrich.

Abstract: We study optimal auctions in a symmetric private values setting, where bidders have signaling concerns: they care about winning the object and a receivers inference about their type. Signaling concerns arise in various economic situations such as takeover bidding, charity auctions, procurement and art auctions. We derive a decomposition of revenue into the standard revenue from the respective auction without signaling concern, and a signaling component. If two auctions have the same signaling value, they yield the same revenue. We then use information design to derive the optimal disclosure of bids. When signaling concerns are linear, it is optimal to reveal whether a bidder participated. Further disclosure of information is immaterial and every auction that reveals participation decisions yields the same highest revenue. With convex signaling concerns it is optimal to run a transparent auction which reveals all bids. With concave signaling concerns a trade-off arises between revealing as few information as possible about submitted bids and revealing participation decisions. The former increases the signaling value for the bidders, the latter allows for extracting a larger share of this signaling value from the bidders. Our methodology combines tools from mechanism design with tools from Bayesian persuasion.