Abstract

Auctions are among the Latest economic institutions in place. They have been used since antiquity to sell a wide variety of goods, and their basic form has remained unchanged. In this dissertation, we explore the efficiency of common auctions when values are interdependent- the value to a particular bidder may depend on information available only to others-and asymmetric. In this setting, it is well known that sealed-bid auctions do not achieve efficient allocations in general since they do not allow the information held by different bidders to be shared.
Typically, in an auction, say of the kind used to sell art, the auctioneer sets a relatively low initial price. This price is then increased until only one bidder is willing to buy the object, and the exact manner in which this is done varies. In my model a bidder who drops out at some price can