We examine the use of breakup fees as a device for target firms to recruit white knights in response to a hostile takeover bid. When bidders have interdependent valuations of the target, the possible use of a breakup fee to subsidize entry of a subsequent bidder overdisciplines the initial...

We consider a multi-winner nested elimination contest in which losers are sequentially eliminated to attain the set of winners. This is a variant of a widely used mechanism introduced by Clark and Riis (1996) that allows one to select the winners sequentially. We show that the current mechanism...