Wednesday, November 6, 2019 | 10:30pm-12:00pm | Room 335, HSBC Business School Building

Abstract

We study how to orchestrate information acquisition in an environment where bidders endowed with original estimates (“types”) about their private values can acquire further information by incurring a cost. We consider both single-round and fully sequential shortlisting rules. The optimal single-round shortlisting rule admits the set of most efficient bidders that maximizes expected virtual surplus adjusted by the second-stage signal and information cost. When shortlisting is fully sequential, at each round, the most efficient remaining bidder is admitted provided that her expected contribution to the virtual surplus is positive conditional on all the information revealed up to this round.