We describe and compare numerical methods used to approximate equilibrium bid functions in models of auctions as games of incomplete information. In such games, private values are modeled as draws from bidder-specific type distributions and pay-your-bid rules are used to determine transactions...

At procurement auctions, with bid preferences, qualified firms are treated special. A common policy involves scaling the bids of preferred firms by a discount factor for the purposes of evaluation only. Introducing such an asymmetry has three effects: first, preferred firms may inflate their...

Within the affiliated private-values paradigm, we develop a tractable empirical model of equilibrium behaviour at first-price, sealed-bid auctions. The model is non-parametrically identified, but the rate of convergence in estimation is slow when the number of bidders is even moderately large,...

Abstract Auction models have proved to be attractive to structural econometricians who, since the late 1980s, have made substantial progress in identifying and estimating these rich game-theoretic models of bidder behavior. We provide a guide to the literature in which we contrast the various...