We characterize optimal selling mechanisms in auction environments where bidders must
incur a cost to learn their valuations. These mechanisms specify for each period, as a …

This paper studies optimal auction design in a private value setting with endogenous
information gathering. We develop a general framework for modeling information acquisition …

Standard auctions are known to be a revenue-maximizing way to sell an object under broad
conditions when buyers are symmetric and have independent private valuations. We show …

Auctions are widely used in practice. Although auctions are also extensively studied in the
literature, most of the developments rely on the significant common prior assumption. We …

This paper studies a model of a sequential auction where bidders are allowed to acquire
further information about their valuations of the object in the middle of the auction. It is shown …

We study the design of profit maximizing single unit auctions under the assumption that the
seller needs to incur costs to contact prospective bidders and inform them about the auction …

We propose a sequential auction mechanism for a single object in which the seller jointly
determines the allocation and the disclosure policy. A sequential disclosure rule is shown to …

Ascending auctions offer agents the option to wait and see before deciding to drop out. We
show that in contexts where as time proceeds agents get finer and finer estimates of their …

Much of the auction literature assumes both a fixed number of bidders and a fixed
information setting. This sidesteps the important and often costly decisions a potential bidder …

We characterise properties of optimal auctions if the seller may disclose information about
the quality of the object for sale. We show that the seller maximizes his expected revenue by …