The most important issues in auction design are the traditional concerns of competition policy-preventing collusive, predatory, and entry deterring behaviour. Ascending and uniform-price auctions are particularly vulnerable to these problems (we discuss radiospectrum and football TV-rights...

We use a classroom game, the Wallet Game, to show that slight asymmetries between bidders can have very large effects on prices in standard ascending (i.e. English) auctions of common-values objects. Examples of small asymmetries are a small value advantage for one bidder or a small ownership of...

We model a War of Attrition with N+K firms competing for N prizes. If firms must pay their full costs until the whole game ends, even after dropping out themselves (as in a standard-setting context), each firms exit time is independent both of K and of other players actions. If, instead, firms...

There were enormous differences in the revenues from the European third generation (3G, or UMTS) mobile-phone license auctions, from 20 Euros per capita in Switzerland to 650 Euros per capita in the U.K., though the values of the licences sold were similar. Poor auction designs in some countries...

This is a preliminary draft of an Invited Symposium paper for the World Congress of the Econometric Society to be held in Seattle in August 2000. We discuss the strong connections between auction theory and standard economic theory, and argue that auction-theoretic tools and intuitions can...

I suggest explanations for the apparently puzzling bidding in the year 2000 British and German 3G telecom auctions. Relative-performance maximisation may have been important, but the outcome of the British auction seems to have been efficient. This paper bundles my comments on two papers...

Switching costs and network effects bind customers to vendors if products are incompatible, locking customers or even markets in to early choices. Lock-in hinders customers from changing suppliers in response to (predictable or unpredictable) changes in efficiency, and gives vendors lucrative ex...