This paper studies optimal auction design when the seller can affect the buyersʼ valuations through an unobservable ex ante investment. The key insight is that the optimal mechanism may have the seller play a mixed investment strategy so as to create correlation between the buyersʼ otherwise...

We give a sufficient condition on the type space for revenue equivalence when the set of social alternatives consists of probability distributions over a finite set. Types are identified with real-valued functions that assign valuations to elements of this finite set, and the type space is...

In many auctions, a good match between the bidder and seller raises the value of the contract for both parties although information about the quality of the match may be incomplete. This paper examines the case in which the bidder is better informed about the quality of his match with the seller...

Every agent reports his willingness to pay for one unit of good. A mechanism allocates goods and cost shares to some agents. We characterize the group strategyproof (GSP) mechanisms under two alternative continuity conditions interpreted as tie-breaking rules. With the maximalist rule (MAX) an...

We derive several implications of incentive compatibility in general (i.e., not necessarily quasilinear) environments. Building on Kos and Messner (2013), we provide a (partial) characterization of incentive compatible mechanisms.

Every agent reports his willingness to pay for one unit of a good. A mechanism allocates goods and cost shares to some agents. We characterize the group strategyproof (GSP) mechanisms under two alternative continuity conditions interpreted as tie-breaking rules. With the maximalist rule (MAX) an...

In Buy-It-Now auctions, sellers can post a take-it-or-leave-it price offer prior to an auction. While the literature almost exclusively looks at buyers in such combined mechanisms, the current paper summarizes results from the sellers' point of view. Buy-It-Now auctions are complex mechanisms...

We study multi-unit auctions where bidders have single-unit demand and asymmetric information. For symmetric equilibria, we identify circumstances where uniform-pricing is better for the auctioneer than pay-as-bid pricing, and where transparency improves the revenue of the auctioneer. An issue...

We consider a two-player contest for a prize of common but uncertain value. We show that less resources are spent in equilibrium if one party is privately informed about the value of a prize than if either both agents are informed or neither agent is informed. Furthermore, the uninformed agent...

We develop a novel theory of real estate foreclosure auctions, which have the special feature that the lender acts as a seller for low and as a buyer for high prices. The theory yields several empirically testable predictions concerning the strategic behavior of the agents, both under symmetric...