We study an incentive auction in which multiple principals bid for the exclusive services, or effort, of a single agent. Each principal has private information about her valuation for these services, and the agent has private information about his disutility of providing them. We characterize...

We consider auction environments in which bidders must incur a cost to learn their valuations and study the optimal selling mechanisms in such environments. These mechanisms specify for each period, as a function of the bids in previous periods, which new potential buyers should be asked to bid....

We study the design of profit maximizing single unit auctions under the assumption that the seller needs to incur costs to contact prospective bidders and inform them about the auction. With independent bidders’ types and possibly interdependent valuations, the seller’s problem can be...