During an English auction, bidders' behaviour conveys information on their valuation of the prize. So whenever valuations are not independent, a bidder's strategy depends on the price at which his competitors drop out before he does. A ring of bidders can strategically manipulate the information...

Calls for tenders are the natural devices to inform bidders, thus to enlarge the pool of potential participants. We exploit discontinuities generated by the Italian Law on tender’s publicity to identify the effect of enlarging the pool of potential participants on competition in public...

Allowing resale in multi-object auctions increases bidders. incentives to jointly reduce demand, because resale increases low-value bidders’ willingness to pay and reduces high-value bidders’ willingness to pay. Therefore (unlike in single-object auctions), resale may reduce the seller’s...

The possibility of resale after an auction attracts speculators (i.e., bidders who have no use value for the objects on sale). In a multi-object auction, a high-value bidder may strictly prefer to let a speculator win some of the objects and then buy in the resale market, in order to keep the...

A bidder is said to be advantaged if she has a higher expected valuation of the auction prize than her competitor. When the prize has a common-value component, a bidder competing in an ascending auction against an advantaged competitor bids especially cautiously and, hence, the advantaged bidder...

We compare two mechanisms through which a potential entrant can take over an incumbent in a market with asymmetric firms: auctions (where other incumbents can bid for the target) and bilateral negotiations between the entrant and the target. The entrant’s choice of target depends on the...

We analyze the effects of resale through bargaining in multi-object uniform-price auctions with asymmetric bidders. The possibility of resale affects bidders’ strategies, and hence the allocation of the objects on sale and the seller’s revenue. Our experimental design consists of four...

After an auction, a losing bidder can purchase the prize from the winner. We show why a strong bidder may prefer to drop out of the auction before the price has reached her valuation, and acquire the prize in the aftermarket: a strong bidder may be in a better bargaining position in the...

We repeatedly elicited individuals? Willingness to Accept (WTA) evaluations for an auctioned bad in an experimental setting in which truthful revelation is the (weakly) dominant strategy. We investigate whether the observation of supposedly irrelevant signals (the market price, the asks at...

We present a model in which issuers of asset backed securities choose to release coarse information to enhance the liquidity of their primary market, at the cost of reducing secondary market liquidity or even causing it to freeze. The degree of transparency is inefficiently low if the social...