When opposing parties compete for a prize, the sunk effort players exert during the conflict can affect the value of the winner's reward. These spillovers can have substantial influence on the equilibrium behavior of participants in applications such as lobbying, warfare, labor tournaments,...

We consider a moral hazard problem in which a principal provides incentives to a team of agents to work on a risky project. The project consists of two milestones of unknown feasibility. While working unsuccessfully, the agents’ private beliefs regarding the feasibility of the project decline....

This paper analyzes a common-value, first-price auction with state-dependent participation. The number of bidders, which is unobservable to them, depends on the true value. For participation patterns with many bidders in each state, the bidding equilibrium may be of a "pooling" type---with high...

A single seller faces a sequence of buyers with unit demand. The buyers are forward-looking and long-lived. Each buyer has private information about his arrival time and valuation where the latter evolves according to a geometric Brownian motion. Any incentive-compatible mechanism has to induce...

I analyze sequential auctions with expectations-based loss-averse bidders who have independent private values and unit demand. Equilibrium bids are history dependent and subject to a discouragement effect: the higher the winning bid in the current round is, the less aggressive the bids of the...

We investigate Groves mechanisms for economies where (i) a social outcome specifies a group of winning agents, and (ii) a cost function associates each group with a monetary cost. In particular, we characterize both (i) the class of cost functions for which there are Groves mechanisms such that...

The usual analysis of bidding in first-price auctions assumes that bidders know the distribution of valuations. We analyze first-price auctions in which bidders do not know the precise distribution of their competitors' valuations, but only the mean of the distribution. We propose a novel...

We study a double auction environment where buyers and sellers have interdependent valuations and multi-unit demand and supply. We propose a new mechanism that satisfies ex post incentive compatibility, individual rationality, feasibility, nonwastefulness, and no budget deficit. Moreover, this...