To make high-quality research more accessible and easier to explore.

Fields:

Ex Post Information in Auctions

Review of Economic Studies 1988 55(3), 409
When buyers' private information about the value of an item for sale is correlated, the seller can increase expected revenue in a sealed bid auction by making the winner's payment a function of information available after the end of the auction. Specifically, revenue can be increased by making the payment a function of all the losing bids. In addition there are gains to making the payment contingent upon some signal of the object's value which becomes public at a later date. That is, there are gains to introducing positive royalty rates.