Existence of monotone pure strategy equilibrium is established in the discriminatory and uniform S + a-th price (a in [0, 1]) auctions of S identical objects when bidders are risk-neutral with independent signals. The model requires discrete price / quantity grids and allows for...

Sellers benefit on average from revealing information about their goods to buyers, but the incentive to exaggerate undermines the credibility of seller statements. When multiple goods are being auctioned, we show that ordinal cheap talk, which reveals a complete or partial ordering of the...

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...

Search engines commonly use “sponsored linksâ€, where certain advertisers’ links are promoted to be placed above others in return for monetary payment. It is natural to assume that all providers value a higher ranked placement more than lower ranked ones. Then how should the...

This paper analyzes bidding behavior in a multi period multiple unit auction. While bidders are ex ante symmetric, the first period outcome translates the second period game to a game between asymmetric bidders. The first period outcome determines who will be a strong or a weak bidder in the...

In this paper I first present a new convergence result which will derive an optimal auction mechanism as a limit of standard nonlinear pricing mechanisms. For example, an optimal auction mechanism of Myerson (1981) will be explicitly derived as a limit of nonlinear pricing mechanisms by Mussa...

We consider competitive bidding for a business license, via an open ascending-price auction, between two symmetric incumbents and a potential entrant, each of whom is privately informed about her own valuation of the license. Entry stands to reduce the payoff of each incumbent below that in...

Within the independent private-values paradigm, we demonstrate nonparametric identification of Dutch and first-price, sealed-bid auction models when bidders are asymmetric. We also demonstrate that, in the presence of a binding reserve price, methods for estimating the distribution of valuations...

We study the design of profit maximizing single unit auctions under the assumption that the seller needs to incur costs to contact prospective bidders and inform them about the auction. When bidders' types are independent (with^Mpossibly bidder-specific distributions) and their valuations are...