According to the well-known “merger paradox”, in a Cournot market game mergers are generally unprofitable unless most firms merge. The present paper proposes an optimal merger mechanism. With this mechanism mergers are never unprofitable, more profitable than in other known mechanisms, and...

We consider procurement auctions when bid preparation is costly and shortlisting is adopted. We find that a policy of reimbursing bidding costs is profitable if and only if performance and bidding costs are negatively correlated. Negative rebates dominate positive rebates.

In a sequence of first-price auctions with stable private values bidders strategically conceal their private information until the last auction. We characterize equilibrium bidding and explore how such signal jamming affects the dynamics of equilibrium prices.