This paper studies sequential auctions of licences to operate in a market where those firms that obtain at least one licence then engage in a symmetric market game. I employ a new refinement of Nash equilibrium, the concept of {\sl Markovian recursively undominated equilibrium}. The unique...

I study monotonicity and uniqueness of the equilibrium strategies in a two-person first price auction with affiliated signals. I show that when the game is symmetric there is a unique Nash equilibrium that satisfies a regularity condition requiring that the equilibrium strategies be {\sl...

How much information does an auctioneer want bidders to have in a private value environment? We address this question using a novel approach to ordering information structures based on the property that in private value settings more information leads to a more disperse distribution of buyers’...

Most cases of cost overruns in public procurement are related to important changes in the initial project design. This paper deals with the problem of design specification in public procurement and provides a rationale for design misspecification. We propose a model in which the sponsor decides...

This article analyses the allocation of prizes in contests. While existing models consider a single contest with an exogenously given set of players, in our model several contests compete for participants. As a consequence, prizes not only induce incentive effects but also participation effects....

When procurement takes place in the presence of horizontally differentiated contractors, the design of the object being procured affects the resulting degree of competition. This paper highlights the interaction between the optimal procurement mechanism and the design choice. Contrary to...

Economics is the science of want and scarcity. We show that want and scarcity, operating within a simple exchange institution (double auction), are sufficient for an economy consisting of multiple inter--related markets to attain competitive equilibrium (CE). We generalize Gode and Sunder's...

We develop a stylized model of horizontal and vertical competition in tournaments with two competing firms. The sponsor cares about the quality of the design but also about the design location. A priori not even the sponsor knows his preferred design location, which is only discovered once he...

Our work attempts to investigate the influence of credit tightness or expansion on activity and relative prices in a multimarket set-up. We report on some double- auction, two-market experiments where subjects had to satisfy an inequality involving the use of credit. The experiments display two...

We run experiments on English Auctions where the bidders already own a part (toehold) of the good for sale. The theory predicts a very strong effect of even small toeholds, however we find the effects are not so strong in the lab. We explain this by analyzing the flatness of the payoff...