We study equilibria in second price auctions when bidders are independently and privately informed about both their values and participation costs and their joint distributions across bidders are not necessarily identical. We show that there always exists an equilibrium in this general setting...

We investigate efficiency properties of sealed-bid second-price auctions with costly participation and resale. Each bidder chooses to participate in the auction if her valuation is higher than her optimally chosen participation cutoff. If resale is not allowed and the bidder valuations are drawn...

A population of players of players is randomly matched to play a normal form game G. The payoffs in this game represent the fitness associated with the various outcomes. Each individual has preferences over the outcomes in the game and chooses an optimal action with respect to those preferences....

In the prisoners' dilemma game, the only evolutionary stable strategy is defection, even though nutual cooperation yields a higher payoff. Building on a paper by Robson (1990), we introduce mutants who have the ability to send a (costly) signal, i.e., the "secret handshake," before each round of...

We investigate equilibria of sealed-bid second price auctions with bidder participation costs in the independent private values environment. We focus on equilibria in cutoff strategies (participate and bid the valuation iff it is greater than the cutoff), since if a bidder finds it optimal to...

We investigate whether efficient collusive bidding mechanisms are affected by potential information leakage from bidders’ decisions to participate in them within the independent private values setting. We apply the concept of ratifiability introduced by Cramton and Palfrey (1995) and show that...