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...

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...

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...

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...

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...