This paper gives an account of events, and explains some systematic reasons of the UMTS auction flop in Switzerland. Apart from general market developments, which could not have been anticipated, we argue that auction design which was introduced in England and adopted in Switzerland and...

This paper analyzes a two-stage sealed-bid auction that is frequently employed in privatization, takeover, and merger and acquisition contests. This auction format yields the same expected revenue as the open ascending (English) auction, yet is less susceptible to preemptive bidding and collusion.

In many auctions, the auctioneer is an agent of the seller. This delegation invites corruption. In this paper we propose a model of corruption, examine how corruption affects the auction game, how the anticipation of corruption affects bidding, and how it altogether changes the revenue ranking...

This paper solves the equilibrium bid functions of third- and higher-price auctions for a large class of distribution functions of bidders' valuations, assuming the symmetric independent private values framework, and risk neutrality. In all these auctions, equilibrium bids exceed bidders'...

We analyze the dynamics of a game of sequential bidding in the presence of stochastic scale effects in the form of stochastic economies or diseconomies of scale. We show that economies give rise to declining expected equilibrium prices, whereas the converse is not generally true. Moreover,...