This paper considers bidder behaviour in the United Kingdom s UMTS spectrum auction. Evidence is reviewed which shows that some bidders in this auction did not bid straightforwardly in accordance with fixed valuations of the licenses. We go on to consider more speculative hypotheses about...

We consider the aggregation of individual agents' von Neumann-Morgenstern preferences over lotteries into a social planner's von Neumann-Morgenstern preference. We start from Harsanyi's [18] axiomatization of utilitarianism, and ask under which conditions a social preference order that satisfies...

We define and investigate a property of mechanisms that we call "strategic simplicity", and that is meant to capture the idea that, in strategically simple mechanisms, strategic choices are easy. We define a mechanism to be strategically simple if strategic choices can be based on first-order...