Abstract:

In the framework of a private-value auction first-price, we consider the seller as a player in a game with the buyers in which he has private information about their realized values. We ask whether the seller can benefit by using his private information strategically. We find that in fact, depending upon his information, set of signals, and commitment power the seller may indeed increase his revenue by strategic transmission of his information. We study mainly the case of partial truthful commitment (VC) in which the seller can commit to send only truthful (verifiable) messages. We show that in the case of two buyers with values distributed independently uniformly on [0,1], a seller informed of the private values of the buyers, can achieve a revenue close to 1/2 by sending verifiable messages (compared to 1/3 in the standard auction), and this is the largest revenue that he can reach with any signaling strategy and any level of commitment. The case studied here provides valuable insight into the issue of strategic use of information which applies more generally.

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