ESSAYS ON INFORMATION DESIGN AND ROBUST AUCTION DESIGN

Abstract

We study information design problems and informationally reduced-form auction design problem. In Chapter 1, we study information design problems in a single-unit auction setting. The information designer controls independent private signals according to which the buyers infer their binary private value. Assuming the seller adopts Myerson's (1981) optimal auction in response, we characterize both the buyer-optimal information structure which maximizes the buyers' surplus and the seller-worst information structure which minimizes the seller's revenue. In Chapter 2, we study information design problems in which the receiver’s action depends on the posterior mean and the sender has a rank-dependent utility. We offer sufficient conditions of optimal signal distributions. In Chapter 3, we study the optimal reduced-form auction which (1) is implementable (in the sense of Border (1991)) in every Bayes Nash equilibrium of every signal distribution and (2) maximizes the seller's worst-case revenue among all Bayes Nash equilibria of all signal distributions.