whom to sell at what price. We establish that optimal information structures in an optimal auction exhibit a number of …

. For any number of objects and bidders, both the pure bundling auction and separate, efficient auctions for the single … objects are revenue-inferior to an auction that involves mixed bundling. …

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 can be explained by a simple extension of the standard auction model, where …

We consider second-price and first-price auctions in the symmetric independent private values framework. We modify the … standard model by the assumption that the bidders have reference-based utility, where the reserve price (minimum bid) plays the … role of the reference point. In contrast to the usual result, the seller’s optimal reserve price is increasing in the …

as equilibrium phenomena of the ascending auction. In a series of experiments, we compare its performance to that of the … discriminatory auction. Strategic demand reduction is quite prevalent in the ascending auction even when entry by the newcomer … imposes a (large) negative externality on incumbents. As a result, the ascending auction performs worse than the …