Competition authorities all over the world worry that integration between search engines (mainly Google) and publishers could lead to abuses of dominant position.  In particular, one concern is that of own-content bias, meaning that Google would bias its rankings in favor of the publishers it...

Search engines enable advertisers to target consumers based on the query they have entered.  In a framework with horizontal product differentiation, imperfect product information and in which consumers incur search costs, I study a game in which advertisers have to choose a price and a set of...

This book is a non-technical introduction to auction theory; its practical application in auction design (including many examples); and its uses in other parts of economics. It can be used for a graduate course on auction theory, or – by picking selectively – an advanced...

We usually assume increases in supply, allocation by rationing, and exclusion of potential buyers will never raise prices. But all of these activities raise the expected price in an important set of cases when common-value assets are sold. Furthermore, when we make the assumptions needed to rule...

None available

This paper, forthcoming in Journal of Economic Surveys, 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,...

We use a classroom game, the Wallet Game, to show that slight asymmetries between bidders can have very large effects on prices in standard ascending (i.e. English) auctions of common-values objects. Examples of small asymmetries are a small value advantage for one bidder or a small ownership of...

This is a preliminary draft of an Invited Symposium paper for the World Congress of the Econometric Society to be held in Seattle in August 2000. We discuss the strong connections between auction theory and standard economic theory, and argue that auction-theoretic tools and intuitions can...