This is an Invited paper for the World Congress of the Econometric Society 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 provide useful arguments and insights in a...

Jump bidding is a commonly observed phenomenon that involves bidders in ascending auctions submitting bids higher than required by the auctioneer. Such behavior is typically explained as due to irrationality or to bidders signaling their value. We present field data that suggests such...

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 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...

What modern game theorists describe as 'fictitious play' is not the learning process George W. Brown defined in his 1951 paper. His original version differs in a subtle detail, namely the order of belief updating. In this note we revive Brown's original fictitious play process and demonstrate...

Fictitious play is the classical myopic learning process, and games with strategic complementarities are an important class of games including many economic applications. Knowledge about convergence properties of fictitious play in this class of games is scarce, however. Beyond dominance...

Fictitious play is the oldest and most studied learning process for games. Since the already classical result for zero-sum games, convergence of beliefs to the set of Nash equilibria has been established for some important classes of games, including weighted potential games, supermodular games...

It is known that every continuous time fictitious play process approaches equilibrium in every nondegenerate 2x2 and 2x3 game, and it has been conjectured that convergence to equilibrium holds generally for 2xn games. We give a simple geometric proof of this.

Laboratory subjects repeatedly played one of two variations of a simple two-person zero-sum game of ``hide and seek.'' Three puzzling departures from the prescriptions of equilibrium theory are found in the data: an asymmetry related to the player's role in the game; an asymmetry across the game...