This paper analyzes the signaling effect of bidding in a two-round elimination contest. Before the final round, bids in the preliminary round are revealed and act as signals of the contestants' private valuations. Depending on his valuation, a contestant may have an incentive to bluff or sandbag...

We study an optimal information/mechanism design problem for selling an object to a number of privately informed bidders, in which the winning bidder competes with a third party under differentiated Cournot competition afterwards. We show how to decompose the problem into two sub-problems:...