The most important issues in auction design are the traditional concerns of competition policy-preventing collusive …

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 … politically important. I illustrate with some disastrous government auctions, but also show the value of economic theory. …

in Seattle in August 2000. We discuss the strong connections between auction theory and 'standard' economic theory, and …

This paper 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 …

discretionary efforts are more likely to arise when competition within a sector is high. Competition mitigates incentives for free … non-monotonic relationship between competition and job security, and predicts patterns for a number of other variables …