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What is the optimal disclosure policy of a seller in a repeated auction? When identical and common value items are auctioned sequentially, information about the outcome of the elapsed auctions, like the winners bid, changes how the bidders value next item and could impact their bidding strategy. We analyse this issue in a twice repeated common value auction, both in theory and in the lab. We show that when the winning bid is disclosed at the end of the first auction, any symmetric equilibrium of the game necessarily involves some bunching at the top: the strategy profiles in the first auction are at for bidders that receive the highest signals about the value of the object. However, the impact of that information disclosure on the sellers profit cannot be assessed analytically. Therefore, we turn to the lab. We observe that the sellers profit decreases with disclosure of the winning bid compared to the case where no information is disclosed at the end of the first auction. The main reason is that bidders decrease drastically their bids in the first auction when they know that the winning bid will be revealed: an anticipation effect. Moreover and as predicted by theory, bunching occurs for high value signals.
