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 examines how shareholdings affect auctions' revenue and efficiency with independent private values. Two types of shareholdings are analyzed: vertical (resp: horizontal) toeholds cover situations in which bidders own a fraction of the seller's profit (resp: a share of their...

We evaluate the impact of three auction mechanisms – the Becker–DeGroot–Marschak (BDM) mechanism, the second-price auction (SPA), and the random nth-price auction (NPA) – in the measurement of private willingness-to-pay and willingness-to-accept for a pure public good. Our results show...

We consider a setting in which two potential buyers, one with a prior toehold and one without, compete in a takeover modeled as an ascending auction with participating costs. The toeholder is more aggressive during the takeover process because she is also a seller of her own shares. The...

We consider an auction setting, in a symmetric information framework, in which bidders, even if they fail to obtain the good, care about the price paid by the winner. We prove that the outcome of the first-price auction is not affected by identity-independent price externalities, while the...