It is widely believed that the English auction is solved after the dominated strategies are eliminated. This opinion is formally confirmed only for one "ascending clock" auction and can not be generalized for most other English auctions. In this paper I show that the formal argument which is...

We analyze a repeated first-price auction in which the types of the players are determined before the first round. It is proved that if every player is using either a belief-based learning scheme with bounded recall or generalized fictitious play learning scheme, then for sufficiently large...

Zwei Experimente mit Entscheidungstrdgern aus der Praxis des Finanzmarkts sind durchgefuehrt worden, um die Frage zu klaeren, ob es Umstände gibt, unter denen der Fluch des Gewinners auch Kapitalmarktprofis gefdhrdet. Die Antwort ist ein klares "Ja". Der Fluch des Gewinners schlug nicht nur im...

We consider 2-bidder first-price auctions where one bidder's value is commonly known. Such auctions induce an ineffcient allocation. We show that a resale opportunity, where the auction winner can make a take-it-or-leave-it offer to the loser, increases (reduces) the ineffciency of the market...

When a partnership comes to an end partners have to determine the terms of the dissolution. A well known way to do so is by enforcing a buy/sell option. Under its rules one partner has to offer a price for the partnership and the other agent can choose whether she wants to sell her share or buy...

In standard auctions with symmetric, independent private value bidders resale creates a role for a speculator - a bidder who is commonly known to have no use value for the good on sale. For second-price and English auctions the efficient value-bidding equilibrium coexists with a continuum of...

We consider a standard two-player all-pay auction with private values, where the valuation for the object is private information to each bidder. The crucial feature is that one bidder is favored by the allocation rule in the sense that he need not bid as much as the other bidder to win the...

We consider the problem of mechanism design by a principal who has private information. We point out a simple condition under which the privacy of the principal's information is irrelevant in the sense that the mechanism implemented by the principal coincides with the mechanism that would be...

This paper investigates various theories explaining banks' overbidding in the fixed rate tenders of the European Central Bank (ECB). Using auction data from both the Bundesbank and the ECB, we show that none of the theories can on its own explain the observed overbidding. This implies that the...

This article reports the results of a first-price sealed-bid auction experiment, which has been designed to test the Nash equilibrium predictions of individual bidding behavior. Subjects faced in 100 auctions always the same resale value and competed with computerized bids. Three treatments were...