Sequential negotiations with costly information acquisition

•This paper explains the seller optimality of partial disclosure in a single-item private-value auction with two bidders.•The identified optimal mechanism is a sequential second-price auction with a reserve price and a buy-now price.•The seller optimally keeps the bids confidential and, sometimes, hides the order in which he approaches the bidders.

Negotiations about a merger or acquisition are often sequential and only partially disclose to bidders information about each otherʼs bids. This paper explains the seller optimality of partial disclosure in a single-item private-value auction with two bidders. Each bidder can inspect the item at a nonprohibitive cost. If a revenue-maximizing seller cannot charge bidders for the information about the otherʼs bid, then the seller optimally runs a sequential second-price auction with a reserve price and a buy-now price. The seller prefers to keep the bids confidential and, sometimes, to hide the order in which he approaches the bidders.