Information disclosure and full surplus extraction in mechanism design

Abstract

I study mechanism design settings with quasi-linear utility where the principal can provide agents with additional private information about their valuations beyond the private information they hold at the outset. I demonstrate that the principal can design information and a mechanism so as to implement the same outcome as if the additional information was publicly known. The key idea is that the principal secretly randomizes over information structures which allows her to cross-check the consistency of agents' reports. As an implication, the principal can fully extract the first-best surplus in a large class of cases.