Discriminatory Information Disclosure

S-Tier
Journal: American Economic Review
Year: 2017
Volume: 107
Issue: 11
Pages: 3363-85

Score contribution per author:

4.022 = (α=2.01 / 2 authors) × 4.0x S-tier

α: calibrated so average coauthorship-adjusted count equals average raw count

Abstract

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.

Technical Details

RePEc Handle
repec:aea:aecrev:v:107:y:2017:i:11:p:3363-85
Journal Field
General
Author Count
2
Added to Database
2026-01-25