Many economic and political decisions are the outcome of strategic contests for a given prize. The nature of such contests can be determined by a designer who is driven by political considerations with a specific political culture. The main objective of this study is to analyze the effect of...

A bidding rotating savings and credit association (Rosca) is modeled as a sequence of symmetricindependent-private-value auctions with price-proportional benefits to bidders. We estimate a structural econometric model which, by introducing an altruistic component into each bidder's utility...

In many circumstances, a principal, who wants prices to be as low as possible, must contract with agents who would like to charge the monopoly price. This paper compares a Demsetz auction, which awards an exclusive contract to the agent bidding the lowest price (competition for the field) with...

Auctions often involve goods exhibiting a common knowledge ex-post risk that is independent of buyers’ private values or their signals regarding common value components. Esö and White (2004) showed theoretically that ex-post risk leads to precautionary bidding for DARA bidders: Agents reduce...

The outcome of non-binding reverse auctions critically depends on how information is distributed during the bidding process. We use data from a large European procurement platform to study the impact of different information structures, specifically the availability of quality information to the...

We analyse the all-pay auction with incomplete information and variance-averse bidders. We characterise the symmetric equilibrium for general distributions of valuations and any number of bidders. Variance aversion is a sufficient assumption to predict that high-valuation bidders increase their...

Multi-unit auctions are sometimes plagued by the so-called exposure problem. In this paper, we analyze a simple game called the 'chopstick auction' in which bidders are confronted with the exposure problem. We analyze the chopstick auction with incomplete information both in theory and in a...

Within the independent private-values paradigm, we derive the data-generating process of the winning bid for the last unit sold at multi-unit sequential English auctions when bidder valuations are draws from different distributions; i.e., in the presence of asymmetries. When the identity of the...

We prove the existence of an increasing equilibrium, and study the comparative statics of correlation in the k-double auction with affiliated private values. This is supposedly the simplest bilateral trading mechanism that allows for dependence in valuations between buyers and sellers. In the...