We consider first-price and second-price auctions with asymmetric buyers, and examine whether pre-auction offers to a subset of buyers are profitable. A single offer is never profitable prior to a second-price auction, but may be profitable prior to a first-price auction. However, a sequence of...

In many contests, a subset of contestants is granted preferential treatment which is presumably intended to be advantageous. Examples include affirmative action and biased procurement policies. In this paper, however, I show that some of the supposed beneficiaries may in fact become worse off...

In models of first-price auctions, when bidders are ex ante heterogeneous, deriving explicit equilibrium bid functions is typically impossible, so numerical methods are often employed to find approximate solutions. Recent theoretical research concerning asymmetric auctions has determined some...

I consider first-price auctions (FPA) and second-price auctions (SPA) with two asymmetric bidders. The FPA is known to be more profitable than the SPA if the strong bidder's distribution function is convex and the weak bidder's distribution is obtained by truncating or horizontally shifting the...