THE INSIDER'S CURSE

This paper studies an auction model in which one of the bidders, the insider, has better information about a common component of the value of the good for sale, than the other bidders, the outsiders. Our main result shows that the insider may have incentives to disclose her private information if she faces sufficiently strong competition from the outsiders. We also show that the insider can protect the value of her private information by hiding her presence in the auction to the outsiders. Finally, we analyze the implications of information revelation on the efficiency of the auction and on the auctioneer's expected revenue.auctions, asymmetric information, information disclosure

The impact of competition on expert's information disclosure: the case of real estate brokers

Competition can theoretically counter or reinforce tendency of experts to pass biased information to customers. Using data from an online company connecting real estate brokers with clients who want to sell their properties, we show that more competition or lower opportunity to collude induce brokers to raise their initial price estimation by more than 3%. This is observed upstream, when experts appraise the property for sale. Competition partially prevents brokers from biaising downward evaluations, and is benecial to the client since it translates into a positive eect on listing and sale prices with no signicant eect on the time to sale

Competition and the Efficiency of Markets for Technology

The sale of R&D projects through licensing facilitates the division of labor between research and development activities. This vertical specialization can improve the overall efficiency of the innovative process. However, these gains depend on the timing of the sale: the buyer of an R&D project should assume development at the stage at which he has an efficiency advantage. We show that in an environment where the seller is overconfident about the value of the project, she may delay the sale to the more efficient firm in order to provide verifiable information about its quality, though this delay implies higher total development costs for the project. We obtain a condition for the equilibrium timing of licensing and examine how factors such as the intensity of competition between potential buyers influence it. We show that a wide array of different explanations, based on differences in information, beliefs or risk profiles, lead to the same qualitative results. We present empirical evidence from pharmaceutical licensing contracts that is consistent with our theoretical predictions