Auctions are among the oldest economic institutions in place. They have been used since antiquity to sell a wide variety of goods, and their basic form has remained unchanged. In this dissertation, we explore the efficiency of common auctions when values are interdependent- the value to a particular bidder may depend on information available only to others-and asymmetric. In this setting, it is well known that sealed-bid auctions do not achieve efficient allocations in general since they do not allow the information held by different bidders to be shared.
