We provide new tools for studying asymmetric first price auctions, connecting their equilibria to the ρ-concavity of the underlying type distributions, and showing how one can use surplus expressions for symmetric auctions to bound equilibrium behavior in asymmetric auctions. We apply these...

We provide approximation results for Nash equilibria in possibly discontinuous games when payoffs and strategy sets are perturbed. We then prove existence results for a new “finitistic” infinite-game generalization of Selten’s (Int J Game Theory 4: 25–55, <CitationRef CitationID="CR23">1975</CitationRef>) notion of perfection and...</citationref>

I consider n-person normal form games where the strategy set of each player is a non-empty compact convex subset of an Euclidean space, and the payoff function of player i is continuous in joint strategies and continuously differentiable and concave in the player i's strategy. No further...

This paper uses a unique data set of Latin American paintings auctioned by Sotheby's between 1995 and 2002 to investigate several puzzles from the recent auctions literature. Our results suggest that: (1) the reputation of an artist and the provenance of the artwork, omitted variables in most...

We study two-stage political contests with private entry costs. We show that these political contests could be ineffective, namely, the chance of low ability candidates participating in the contest might be higher than the chance of high ability candidates participating in the contest (and...

We analyze optimal schemes for privatization in a transitional economy. In many cases, established Western firms are good candidates for large shareholders of a local firm, since the sale of the shares can generate large amount of revenues and furthermore, in the future, the home country can...

We study optimal contest design in situations where the designer can reward high performance agents with positive prizes and punish low performance agents with negative prizes. We link the optimal prize structure to the curvature of distribution of abilities in the population. In particular, we...

We construct a model to analyse the two types of tender procedures used by the European Central Bank (ECB) in its open market operations. We assume that the ECB minimizes the expected value of a loss function that depends on the quadratic difference between the interbank rate and a target...

We study asymmetric all-pay auctions with multiple objects where players’ values for the objects are common knowledge. The players have different values for the objects but they have the same ranking. The contest designer may award one prize including all the objects to the player with the...

The design of cost minimizing procurement rules for the selection of contractors among distinct technological groups requires the favouritism of inefficient firms. It is unclear whether these policies provide incentives for inefficient firms to adopt more efficient technologies. In this paper...