Discriminatory Information Disclosure

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Li, Hao; Shi, Xianwen
• 署名单位: University of British Columbia; University of Toronto
• 刊物名称: AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0002-8282
• DOI: 10.1257/aer.20151743
• 发表日期: 2017
• 页码: 3363-3385
• 关键词: Mechanism design; auctions; COMMUNICATION; VALUATIONS

摘要

A seller designs a mechanism to sell a single object to a potential buyer whose private type is his incomplete information about his valuation. The seller can disclose additional information to the buyer about his valuation without observing its realization. In both discrete-type and continuous-type settings, we show that discriminatory disclosure-releasing different amounts of additional information to different buyer types-dominates full disclosure in terms of seller revenue. An implication is that the orthogonal decomposition technique, while an important tool in dynamic mechanism design, is generally invalid when information disclosure is part of the design.