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arXiv · 2608.04332

Informational Content of Auction Prices

Yu Awaya·Vijay Krishna·Eduard Osipov
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Abstract

We study auctions of k identical objects to n bidders, each of whom wants at most one. The objects have a common but unknown value and the bidders receive private signals about this value. The discriminatory price auction and the uniform-price auction are compared in terms of how informative the resulting auction prices (not bids) are in conveying the true value to an outside observer/investor. Since both auctions have symmetric, monotone equilibria, the problem reduces to comparing the informativeness of the highest order statistic of a sample to the (k+1)st highest. We find sufficient conditions under which the highest order statistic is superior---in the sense of Lehmann---in this regard. The sufficient conditions involve the informativeness of high versus low signals and the ratio k/n of objects to bidders. These conditions are also qualitatively necessary.

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Yu Awaya, Vijay Krishna, Eduard Osipov. 2026-08-05. Informational Content of Auction Prices. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.04332

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