Ignorance Promotes Competition: An Auction Model with Endogenous Private Valuations
研究拍卖方在拥有物品私人信息时，如何决定披露多少信息给竞拍者，发现拍卖方倾向于少披露信息，且披露量随竞拍人数增加而增加，完全竞争时达到有效水平。
We study a situation in which an auctioneer wishes to sell an object to one of N risk-neutral bidders with heterogeneous preferences. The auctioneer does not know bidders' preferences but has private information about the characteristics of the object, and must decide how much information to reveal prior to the auction. We show that the auctioneer has incentives to release less information than would be efficient and that the amount of information released increases with the level of competition (as measured by the number of bidders). Furthermore, in a perfectly competitive market the auctioneer would provide the efficient level of information.