We show that jump bids can be used by a bidder to create a winner's curse and preserve an informational advantage that would otherwise disappear in the course of an open ascending auction. The eect of the winner's curse is to create allocative distortions and reduce the seller's expected...

We analyze the rationale for hiding information in open auction formats. In particular, we focus on the incentives for a bidder to call a price higher than the highest standing one in order to prevent the remaining active bidders from aggregating more accurate information that could be gathered...

We show that the commitment to not allocate may be exploited by a seller/social planner to increase the expected social surplus that can be achieved in the sale of an indivisible unit.

We show that open ascending auctions are prone to inecient rushes, i.e. all bidders quitting at the same price, in market environments such as privatizations, takeover contests, and procurement auctions. Rushes arise when an incumbent with better information about a common value component of the...

Does the type of post-auction feedback affect bidding behavior in first price auctions? Filiz- Ozbay and Ozbay (2007) find that such manipulation can increase bids in a one-shot auction. They explain this as an effect of anticipated regret combined with the assumption that feedback directly...

We study the second best in a single unit sale to two bidders. This is the allocation that maximizes the expected social surplus subject to the biddersʼ incentive compatible constraints when the first best is not implementable. We prove that Maskinʼs (1992) result that any first best...

We show that the commitment to not allocate may be exploited by a seller/social planner to increase the expected social surplus that can be achieved in the sale of an indivisible unit.

We characterize the incentive compatible allocation that maximizes the expected social surplus in a single-unit sale when the efficient allocation is not implementable. This allocation may involve no selling when it is efficient to sell. We then show that the English auction always implements...

We consider an auction setting in which potential buyers, even if they fail to obtain the good, care about the price paid by the winner. We study the impact of these price-externalities on the first-price auction and the second-price auction in a symmetric information framework. First, we...

We evaluate the impact of three auction mechanisms – the Becker–DeGroot–Marschak (BDM) mechanism, the second-price auction (SPA), and the random nth-price auction (NPA) – in the measurement of private willingness-to-pay and willingness-to-accept for a pure public good. Our results show...