Most of the literature on auctions assumes that the auctioneer owns the object on sale. However most auctions are organized and run by an agent of the owner. This separation generates the possibility of corruption. We analyze the effect of a particular form of corruption on bidding behavior in a...

Within the independent private-values paradigm, we derive the data-generating process of the winning bid for the last unit sold at multi-unit, sequential, oral, ascending-price auctions when bidder valuations are draws from different distributions; i.e., in the presence of asymmetries. When the...

Ascending price clock auctions with drop-out information typically yield outcomes closer to equilibrium predictions than do comparable sealed-bid auctions. However clock auctions require congregating all bidders for a fixed time interval, which has limited field applicability and introduces...

This paper evaluates performance of human subjects and instances of a bidding model that interact in continuous-time double auction experiments. Asks submitted by instances of the seller model ("automated sellers") maximize the seller's expected surplus relative to a heuristic belief function,...

We study security-bid auctions in which bidders compete for an asset by bidding with securities. That is, they offer payments that are contingent on the realized value of the asset being sold. Standard auction mechanisms (such as first-price and second-price auctions) are not well defined unless...

A crucial assumption in the optimal auction literature has been that each bidder's valuation is known to be drawn from a single unique distribution. In this paper we relax this assumption and study the optimal auction problem when there is ambiguity about the distribution from which these...

We analyze the problem of a seller who has multiple units of a good and faces a set of buyers with unit demands, private information, and identity-dependent externalities. We derive the seller's optimal mechanism and characterize its main properties. As an application of the model, we consider...

Within the heterogeneous independent private values model, we analyze bidder collusion at first and second price single-object auctions, allowing for within-cartel transfers. Our primary focus is on (i) coalitions that contain a strict subset of all bidders and (ii) collusive mechanisms that do...

How do informational asymmetries between bidders affect the outcome of common value auctions? Should the seller accept bids from bidders with more precise information? If so, under what conditions? What effect do such asymmetries have on the seller’s expected revenue? We analyze these...

We consider parametric examples of two-bidder private value auctions in which each bidder observes her own private valuation as well as noisy signals about her opponent’s private valuation. In such multidimensional private value auction environments, we show that the revenue equivalence...