Alp Atakan (Queen Mary) 11.01.2023

We study a common-value auction in which a large number of identical, indivisible object are sold to a large number of ex-ante identical bidders with unit demand. Bidders are initially uninformed but can acquire information from multiple sources that differ in accuracy and cost. We define a cost-accuracy ratio for each available source of information. The minimum value of this cost-accuracy ratio among all information sources fully determines the limit price distribution and the information content of the auction's price. Information is aggregated if and only if the minimum cost-accuracy ratio is equal to zero. We also characterize all equilibria of the auction for posterior separable information costs with a sufficiently rich set of experiments. In this case information is aggregated if and only if the cost function is differentiable at the prior.