Many auctions and procurement contests entail nontrivial bidding costs, which makes the bidders' participation decisions endogenous to the auction design. We analyze the effect of different auction rules on potential bidders' incentives to participate. We focus on first-price auctions with...

Casting mechanism design with evidence in the framework of Myerson (1982) implies that his generalized revelation principle directly applies, and we thus obtain standard notions of incentive compatible direct mechanisms. Their specific nature depends, however, on whether the presentation of...

We study the problem of distributing subsidies in a market that includes both marginal individuals in need of assistance and infra-marginal individuals who would purchase the subsidized product without additional incentives. We propose the use of a wait time auction, where individuals bid the...

We study optimal auctions in a symmetric private values setting, where bidders have signaling concerns: they care about winning the object and a receivers inference about their type. Signaling concerns arise in various economic situations such as takeover bidding, charity auctions, procurement...