A competitive economy is studied in which sellers offer alternative direct mechanisms to buyers who have correlated private information about their valuations. In contrast to the monopoly case where sellers charge entry fees and extract all buyers surplus, it is shown that in the \emph{unique}...

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 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...

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....

We study optimal contest design in situations where the designer can reward high performance agents with positive prizes and punish low performance agents with negative prizes. We link the optimal prize structure to the curvature of distribution of abilities in the population. In particular, we...

A competitive economy is studied in which sellers offer alternative direct mechanisms to buyers who have private information about their own private use value for the commodity being traded. In addition the commodity has a common value to all buyers, perhaps represented by the future resale...

This paper studies optimal auction design in a private value setting with endogenous information acquisition. First, we develop a general framework for modeling information acquisition when a seller wants to sell an object to one of several potential buyers who can each gather information about...

We characterize Bayesian Nash equilibria for asymmetric ascending auctions in which both common and private value components are accommodated, and bidders' valuations and signals are drawn from asymmetric distributions. It is shown that the equilibrium inverse bid functions in each round of the...