I describe a new static (sealed-bid) auction for multiple substitute goods.  As in a two-sided simultaneous multiple round auction (SMRA), bidders bid on multiple assets simultaneously, and bid-takers choose supply functions across assets.  The auction yields more efficiency, revenue,...

We compare the most common methods for selling a company or other asset when participation is costly: a simple simultaneous auction, and a sequential process in which potential buyers decide in turn whether or not to enter the bidding.  The sequential process is always more efficient.  But...

What should be the West's top priority for climate-change policy?  This article is a revsied and updated version of my talk to the Potsdam Global Sustainability Symposium (which drafted the "Potsdam Declaration" presented to the 2007 UN Climate Change Conference in Bali).

We briefly survey the economics of network effects and switching costs (in 3,400 words). For comprehensive coverage of the same ground see Farrell and Klemperer`s 60,000-word contemporaneous survey, available at www.paulklemperer.org.

Part ownership of a takeover target can help a bidder win a takeover auction, often at a low price. A bidder with a toehold bids aggressively in a standard ascending auction because its offers are both bids for the remaining shares and asks for its own holdings. While the direct effect of a...

We usually assume increases in supply, allocation by rationing, and exclusion of potential buyers will never raise prices. But all of these activities raise the expected price in an important set of cases when common-value assets are sold. Furthermore, when we make the assumptions needed to rule...

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We compare the two most common bidding processes for selling a company or other asset when participation is costly to buyers. In an auction all entry decisions are made prior to any bidding. In a sequential bidding earlier entrants can make bids before later entrants choose whether to compete....

Economic Theory is often abused in practical policy-making. There is frequently excessive focus on sophisticated theory at the expense of elementary theory; too much economic knowledge can sometimes be a dangerous thing. Too little attention is paid to the wider economic context, and to the...

This paper, forthcoming in Journal of Economic Surveys, provides an elementary, non-technical, survey of auction theory, by introducing and describing some of the critical papers in the subject. (The most important of these are reproduced in a companion book, The Economic Theory of Auctions,...