The Combinatorial Clock Auction (CCA) is an important recent innovation in auction design which has been adopted for many spectrum auctions worldwide. Since its inception, the CCA has been in almost continual evolution. We begin by reviewing some important changes which have already occurred....

We generalize the Vickrey auction to allow for reserve pricing in a multi-unit auction with interdependent values. In the Vickrey auction with reserve pricing, the seller determines the quantity to be made available as a function of the bidders' reports of private information, and then...

The details of the auction design could make or break the Treasury's plan to invest $700 billion in mortgage-related securities to resolve the financial crisis, using market mechanisms such as reverse auctions to determine prices, according to Lawrence M. Ausubel and Peter Cramton.

On Tuesday, 10 February 2009, Treasury Secretary Geithner proposed the aggregator bank ("public-private investment fund") as a key instrument to resolve the financial crisis. He left out many details, so Lawrence Ausubel and Peter Cramton explain how an aggregator bank might operate in practice,...

A family of ascending package auction models is introduced in which bidders may determine their own packages on which to bid. In the proxy auction (revelation game) versions, the outcome is a point in the core of the exchange economy for the reported preferences. When payoffs are linear in money...

Fears of pricing troubled assets have needlessly stalled the rescue effort, according to Lawrence Ausubel and Peter Cramton, two market-design economists whose work on TARP has received the attention of the Treasury and policy makers.

This paper studies the participation and performance of sophisticated versus unsophisticated auction participants in an environment with numerous bidders, uncertainty, and asymmetric information. We examine multi-unit, pay-as-bid, currency auctions conducted by the Central Bank of Venezuela. We...

In auction environments where bidders have pure private values, the Vickrey auction (Vickrey, 1961) provides a simple mechanism for efficiently allocating homogeneous goods. However, in environments where bidders have interdependent values, the Vickrey auction does not generally yield...