It is widely believed that the English auction is solved after the dominated strategies are eliminated. This paper demonstrates that the dominance criterion is not very effective in many English auction models. To bid more than the true willingness to pay is dominated but a stronger solution...

We consider second-price common-value auctions with an increasing number of bidders. We define a strategy of bidder i to be (ex-post, weakly) asymptotically dominated if there is another strategy for i that does, in the limit, as well against any sequence of strategies of iʼs opponents, and...

We study a class of common-value second-price auctions with differential information. This class of common-value auctions is characterized by the property that each player's information set is connected with respect to the common value. We showthat the entire class is dominance solvable, and...

Infrastructure projects are often technically complicated and highly customized. Therefore, procurement competition tends to be limited. Competition is the single most important factor toward auction efficiency and anti-corruption. However, the degree of competition realized is closely related...

Limited competition has been a serious concern in infrastructure procurement. Importantly, however, there are normally a number of potential bidders initially showing interest in proposed projects. This paper focuses on tackling the question why these initially interested bidders fade out. An...

We introduce 'formal methods' of mechanized reasoning from computer science to address two problems in auction design and practice: is a given auction design soundly specified, possessing its intended properties; and, is the design faithfully implemented when actually run? Failure on either...

This paper reports on the design of a novel two-stage mechanism, based on strictly proper scoring rules, that allows a centre to acquire a costly probabilistic estimate of some unknown parameter, by eliciting and fusing estimates from multiple suppliers. Each of these suppliers is capable of...

This paper analyses the pay-per-bid auctions which have appeared recently on the Internet and scored an immediate business success. In these auctions bidders pay a small, but irrevocable fee each time they want to increase the price. In this paper we test the model suggested by Platt, Price and...

Public procurement is a dynamic process involving vendors, contractors and procuring agencies. Even before submitting bids, competition among contractors may already have started. Given the nature of public work and expected strategies of rivals, some firms decide to enter the market, but others...

Formal methods use computers to verify proofs or even discover new theorems. Interest in applying formal methods to problems in economics has increased in the past decade, but - to date - none of this work has been published in economics journals. This paper applies formal methods to a familiar...