A buyer seeks to procure a good characterized by its price and its quality from suppliers who have private information about their cost structure (fixed cost + marginal cost of providing quality). We solve for the optimal buying mechanism, i.e. the procedure that maximizes the buyer’s expected...

We investigate the role of market transparency in repeated first-price auctions. We consider a setting with private and independent values across bidders. The values are assumed to be perfectly persistent over time. We analyze the first-price auction under three distinct disclosure regimes...

I describe a new static (sealed-bid) auction for differentiated goods - the "Product-Mix Auction". Bidders bid on multiple assets simultaneously, and bidtakers choose supply functions across assets. The auction yields greater efficiency, revenue, information, and trade than running multiple...

We propose a new, easy-to-implement, class of payment rules, "Reference Rules," to make core-selecting package auctions more robust. Small, almost riskless, profitable deviations from "truthful bidding" are often easy for bidders to find under currently-used payment rules. Reference Rules...

We study optimal contest design in situations where the designer can reward high performance agents with positive prizes and punish low performance agents with negative prizes. We link the optimal prize structure to the curvature of distribution of abilities in the population. In particular, we...

If bidders can acquire information during the auction the descending auction is no longer equivalent to a first-price-sealed-bid auction. Revenue equivalence does not hold. The incentive to acquire information can even be larger in a descending auction than in an ascending auction.

This paper explores the use of auctions for privatizing public assets. In our model, a single ‘insider’ bidder (e.g. incumbent management of a government-owned firm) possesses information about the asset’s risky value. In addition, bidders are privately informed about their costs of...

The experimental literature has documented that there is overbidding in second-price auctions, regardless of bidders' valuations. In contrast, in first-price auctions there tends to be overbidding for large valuations, but underbidding for small valuations. We show that the experimental evidence...

We conduct a laboratory experiment of second-price sealed bid auctions of a common value good with two bidders. Bidders face three different types of information: common uncertainty (unknown information), private information (known by one bidder) and public information (known by both bidders),...

We study all-pay auctions with multiple prizes. The players have the same value for all the certain prizes except for one uncertain prize for which each player has a private value. We characterize the equilibrium strategy and show that if the number of prizes is smaller than the number of...