We study the impact of crossholdings on the efficiency of the standard auction formats. The ascending auction is not equivalent to the second-price auction. In a class of examples, the ascending auction is the only efficient standard auction format.

Time overruns are common in public works and are not confined to inherently complex tasks. One explanation advanced in this paper is that bidders can undergo unpredictable changes in production costs which generate an option value of waiting. By exploiting the real-option approach, we examine...

We compare auctioning and grandfathering as allocation mechanisms of emission permits when there is a secondary market with market power and the firms have private information. Based on real-life cases such as the EU ETS, we consider a multi-unit, multi-bid uniform auction, modelled as a...

Contracts providing payments for not developing natural areas, or for removing cropland from production, generally require long-term commitments. Landowners, however, can decide to prematurely terminate the contract when the opportunity cost of complying with conservation requirements increases....

In a real-time electric power auction, the bids of producers consist of committed supply as a function of price. The bids are submitted under uncertainty, before the demand by the Independent System Operator has been realized. In the Supply Function Equilibrium (SFE), every producer chooses the...

Within the framework of the common value model, we examine the magnitude of the difference in expected outcome between first-price and second-price sealed bid auctions. The study is limited to two empirical specifications of bidders' signals: Weibull and normal distribution. The optimal bid...

Theoretical models of information asymmetry have identied a tradeoff between the desire to learn and the desire to prevent an opponent from learning private information. This paper reports a laboratory experiment that investigates if actual bidders account for this tradeoff, using a sequential...

Consider a market where producers submit supply functions to a procurement auction — e.g. an electric power auction — under uncertainty, before demand has been realized. In the Supply Function Equilibrium (SFE), every firm commits to the supply function maximizing his expected profit given...