Often an organization or government must allocate goods without collecting payment in return. This may pose a difficult problem either when agents receiving those goods have private information in regards to their values or needs or when discriminating among agents using known differences is not...

This paper studies equilibria in second price auctions with information acquisition in an independent private value setting. We focus on the existence and uniqueness of equilibrium in the information acquisition stage for both homogenous and heterogenous bidders. It is shown that, when the...

This paper investigates bidder's covert behavior of endogenous information acquisition on her opponents' valuations in first price auction model with independent private values. Such an information acquisition setting leads to bidimensional type space and bidimensional strategy space. We...

We investigate a finite-horizon dynamic pricing problem of a seller under limited commitment. Even when the buyers are ex-ante symmetric to the seller, the seller can charge different prices to different buyers. We show that under the class of posted-price mechanisms this asymmetric treatment of...

Auctioneers who have an indivisible object for sale and believe that bidders are risk neutral can find the recipe for an optimal auction in Myerson (1981); auctioneers who believe that bidders are loss averse can find it here: An optimal auction is an all pay auction with minimum bid, and any...

Using contests to generate innovation has and is widely used. Such contests often involve offering a prize that depends upon the accomplishment (effort). Using an all-pay auction as a model of a contest, we determine the optimal reward for inducing innovation. In a symmetric environment, we find...

We theoretically and experimentally study independent private value auctions in the presence of bidders who are loss averse in the sense of Köszegi and Rabin (2007). In one specification, we consider gains and losses in two dimensions separately, about whether they receive the object or not,...

Many grant applications have a preliminary stage where only a select group are invited to submit a full application. Similarly, procurement contracts by governments are often awarded through a two-stage procedure. We model and analyze such environments where the designer cares about the style of...

We define generalized extensive-form games which allow for mutual unawareness of actions. We extend Pearce's (1984) notion of extensive-form (correlated) rationalizability to this setting, explore its properties and prove existence. We define also a new variant of this solution concept, prudent...

We define generalized extensive-form games which allow for mutual unawareness of actions. We extend Pearce's (1984) notion of extensive-form (correlated) rationalizability to this setting, explore its properties and prove existence. We define also a new variant of this solution concept, prudent...