Information acquisition during a Dutch auction

In this paper we consider equilibrium behavior in a Dutch (descending price) auction when the bidders are uninformed of their valuations with probability q and can acquire information about their valuation with a positive cost during the auction. We assume that the information acquisition activity is covert. We characterize the equilibrium behavior in the setting where bidders are ex-ante symmetric and have independent private values. We show that when the number of bidders is large the Dutch auction produces more revenue than the first price auction.