Practical or legal constraints often restrict auctions to being symmetric (anonymous and nondiscriminatory). We examine when this restriction prevents a seller from achieving his objectives. In an independent private value setting with heterogenous buyers, we characterize the set of incentive...

We study auction design in the standard symmetric independent private values environment, where the seller lacks the commitment power to withhold an unsold object off the market. The seller has a single object and can conduct an infinite sequence of standard auctions with reserve prices to...

In many markets, sellers advertise their good with an asking price. This is a price at which the seller is willing to take his good off the market and trade immediately, though it is understood that a buyer can submit an offer below the asking price and that this offer may be accepted if the...

We study mechanism design in a setting where agents know their types but are uncertain about the utility from any alternative. The final realized utility of each agent is observed by the principal and can be contracted upon. In such environments, the principal is not restricted to using only...

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.

This paper proposes a nonparametric test of exogenous participation in first-price auctions. Exogenous participation means that the valuation distribution does not depend on the number of bidders. Our test is motivated by the fact that two valuation distributions are the same if and only if...

This paper considers nonparametric estimation of first-price auction models under the monotonicity restriction on the bidding strategy. Based on an integrated-quantile representation of the first-order condition, we propose a tuning-parameter-free estimator for the valuation quantile function....

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...