politically important. I illustrate with some disastrous government auctions, but also show the value of economic theory. …

This paper provides an elementary, non-technical, survey of auction theory, by introducing and describing some of the … critical papers in the subject. The most important of these are reproduced in a companion book, The Economic Theory of Auctions … the basic analysis of optimal auctions, the revenue equivalence theorem, and marginal revenues. Subsequent sections …

in Seattle in August 2000. We discuss the strong connections between auction theory and 'standard' economic theory, and … argue that auction-theoretic tools and intuitions can provide useful argument and insights in a broad range of mainstream … economic settings that do not, at first sight, look like auctions. We also discuss some more obvious applications, especially …

discuss radiospectrum and football TV-rights auctions, electricity markets, and takeover battles), and the Anglo-Dutch auction … discuss the current 3G spectrum auctions in Germany and the Netherlands. Auction design is a matter of ‘horses for courses …The most important issues in auction design are the traditional concerns of competition policy-preventing collusive …

capital are around 80 percent. We also find strong complementarities between human capital and labor and substantial total …

analogous to the one predicted by exporting models. Our quantitative analysis exploits these complementarities to distinguish …