We give necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of symmetric equilibrium without ties in common values auctions, with multidimensional independent types and no monotonic assumptions. When the conditions are not satisfied, we are still able to prove the existence of pure strategy...

In this paper we characterize the optimal allocation mechanism for $N$ objects, (permits), to $I$ potential buyers, (firms). Firms' payoffs depend on their costs, the costs of competitors and on the final allocation of the permits, allowing for externalities, substitutabilities and...

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...

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

We analyze the two-bidder discriminatory auction with downward sloping marginal valuations and a continuous, variable award. We allow for a common component in marginal valuations and affiliation. We focus on problems that admit solutions with strictly downward sloping bidding schedules. Using...

We consider a model where bidders in an auction own passive partial claims over their rivals’ auction profits. While the cross ownership confers no ability to directly affect bidding behavior, the claims on rival profits dampen bidding competition. It is not uncommon for enforcement agencies...

The use of dynamic auctions is a major component in many enterprises' e-procurement initiatives. In the case where suppliers offer goods and services of inherently different quality the traditional mechanism has been the request for quote. In a request for quote, suppliers submit a sealed bid...

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...

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...

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...