We study the second best in a single unit sale to two bidders. This is the allocation that maximizes the expected social surplus subject to the biddersʼ incentive compatible constraints when the first best is not implementable. We prove that Maskinʼs (1992) result that any first best...

We show that the commitment to not allocate may be exploited by a seller/social planner to increase the expected social surplus that can be achieved in the sale of an indivisible unit.

This paper studies the incentives of a bidder to acquire information in an auction when her information acquisition decision is observed by the other bidders before bidding. Our results show that the sealed bid (second price) auction may induce more information acquisition about a common...

We develop a model of bidding markets with financial constraints à la Che and Gale [15] in which two firms choose their budgets optimally and we extend it to a dynamic setting over an infinite horizon. We provide three main results for the case in which the exogenous cash-flow is not too large...