that collusion among the bidders (which ultimately did occur; The Economist, May 17, 1997, p. 86) is more easily sustained within an open auction, in the end the faith placed in the linkage principle outweighed this concern and an open auction format was employed. Indeed, according to McMillan (1994), the experts "judged [the negative collusion effect] to be outweighed by the bidders' ability to learn from others' bids in the open auction." The linkage principle implies that open auctions generally lead to higher expected prices than sealed-bid auctions. As stated by Milgrom and Weber (1982, p.1095),"One explanation of this inequality is that when bidders are uncertain about their valuations, they can acquire useful information by scrutinizing the bidding behavior of their competitors during the course of an [ascending-bid] auction. That extra information weakens the winner's curse and leads to more aggressive bidding in the [ascending-bid] auction, which accounts for the higher expected price." The linkage principle also implies that the auctioneer maximizes the expected price by always fully revealing all information it has regarding the object being sold completely. In the words of Milgrom and Weber (1982,p. 1096), "Honesty is the best policy." In order to provide a statement of the linkage principle, we follow the presentation of Krishna, which notes that the linkage principle "was first set forth and used by Milgrom and Weber (1982)." (Krishna, 2002, p. 111) We begin by defining the necessary concepts and notation required to state the linkage principle. Define a standard auction format to be one in which the high bidder wins. Suppose that each bidder, receives a signal regarding the value of the object. We assume the valuation to each bidder depends on its own observed signal and symmetrically upon the unobserved signals of the other bidders (so that the signals of the other bidders can be interchanged without affecting a given bidder's value). More specifically, assume all signals are drawn from the interval and that for all we can write the value of bidder as where the function is symmetric in the last components. We now define other random variables and mappings with respect to bidder 1, but because of the assumed symmetry, they are the same for all bidders. Define random variables to be the largest, second largest, etc., from among . Let denote the distribution of conditional on , i.e., , and let be the associated density. We let