We study optimal contest design in situations where the designer can reward high performance agents with positive prizes and punish low performance agents with negative prizes. We link the optimal prize structure to the curvature of distribution of abilities in the population. In particular, we...

If bidders can acquire information during the auction the descending auction is no longer equivalent to a first-price-sealed-bid auction. Revenue equivalence does not hold. The incentive to acquire information can even be larger in a descending auction than in an ascending auction.

We study a general model of common-value second-price auctions with differential information. We show that one of the bidders has an inform tion advantage over the other bidders if and only if he possesses dominantstrategy. A dominant strategy is in fact unique and is given by the conditional...

We use a second-price common-value auction, the maximal game, to experimentally study whether the Winner’s Curse (WC) can be explained by models which retain best-response behavior but allow for inconsistent beliefs. In the maximal game, the WC can be rationalized only by a belief that others...

In symmetric common value auctions where bidders differ ex-post in information quality, a seller may benefit from imposing a ceiling on allowable bids. By reducing the winner's curse facing poorly informed bidders, a ceiling encourages them to bid aggressively. This may reduce information rents...

It is common practice for firms to pool their expertise by forming parterships such as joint ventures and strategic alliances. A Central organizational problem in such parterships is that managers may behave noncooperatively in order to advance the interests of their parent firms. We ask whether...

Ths authors consider a first-price auction when the ranking of bidders' private valuations is common knowledge among bidders. This new informational framwork is motivated by several applications, from procurement to privatization. It induces a particular asymmetric auction model with affiliated...

This paper explores the use of auctions for privatizing public assets. In our model, a single ‘insider’ bidder (e.g. incumbent management of a government-owned firm) possesses information about the asset’s risky value. In addition, bidders are privately informed about their costs of...

The experimental literature has documented that there is overbidding in second-price auctions, regardless of bidders' valuations. In contrast, in first-price auctions there tends to be overbidding for large valuations, but underbidding for small valuations. We show that the experimental evidence...