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....

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...

In an article published in this journal, Rapoport and Amaldoss (2000, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 42, 483-521) analyze symmetric and asymmetric investment games similar to two-player all-pay auctions with bid caps. In this note, we correct an error in their characterization of...

This paper contributes to the study of tacit collusion by analyzing infinitely reaped multiunit uniform price auctions in a symmetric oligopoly with capacity constrained firms. Under both the Market Clearing and Maximum Accepted Price rules of determining the uniform price, we show that when...

The competitive market model is a paradoxical. In perfect competition, agents cannot influence price: they only select an output quantity. Such passive behavior doesn’t conform to the intuitive notion of competition. This paper describes an experiment which demonstrates that near or even at a...