Thesis Title: Essays in Auction Design

Auctions are typically modelled as a selling mechanism between multi-ple potential buyers, each with private preference information, and a seller whose preferences are known. This significantly influences the predictions of the theory, since the existence of potential gains from trade is commonly known, and the seller cannot earn any informational rent. Further, the issue of interdependence between the preferences of buyers and and the seller is ignored. This thesis studies auction design under two sided private informa-tion, and the associated repercussions for the auction design objectives of profit and efficiency. This paper addresses an aspect of the interdependency issue, namely how a seller who holds private information about the quality of a good should conduct the auction. 1 In recent work Cai, Riley and Ye (2007) have demonstrated that a seller who holds private information about the quality of a goo