This article investigates the impact of the distribution of preferences on equilibrium behavior in conflicts that are modeled as all-pay auctions with identity-dependent externalities. In this context, we define centrists and radicals using a willingness-to-pay criterion that admits preferences...

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is one of the poorest countries in the World. The construction sector will play an essential part to bring the country on the path of economic growth, and competition within the sector is crucial to achieve this goal. In this paper we analyze the effect of...

We compare two commonly used mechanisms in procurement: auctions and negotiations. The execution of the procurement mechanism is delegated to an agent of the buyer. The agent has private information about the buyer's preferences and may collude with one of the sellers. We provide a precise...

We study experimentally the effect of bargaining power in two sequential mechanisms that offer the possibility to trade at a fixed price before an auction. In the “Buy-It-Now” format, the seller has the bargaining power and offers a price prior to the auction; whereas in the...

We conducted a controlled field experiment on eBay and examined to what extent both social and competitive laboratory behavior is robust to institutionally complex real world markets with experienced traders, who selected themselves into these markets. EBay's natural trading system provides...

We study ex post outsourcing of production in an imperfectly discriminating contest, interpreted here as a research tournament or a procurement contest for being awarded some production contract. We find that the possibility of outsourcing increases competition between the contestants, leading...

Sustainability and efficiency are potentially conflicting social objectives in natural resource management. We propose a market mechanism to allocate use rights over a stochastic resource to private managers. The mechanism endogenously determines the maximal tenure length guaranteeing that the...

Recent literature has shown that all-pay auctions raise more money for charity than winner-pay auctions. We demonstrate that the first and second-price winner-pay auctions generate higher revenue than first-price all-pay auctions when bidders are sufficiently asymmetric. To prove it, we consider...

Is it better to be a big fish in a small pond or a small fish in a big pond? To find out, we study self-selection into contests among a large population of heterogeneous agents. Our simple and highly tractable model generates many testable and sometimes surprising predictions. For example: 1)...

Auctions are the allocation-mechanisms of choice whenever goods and information in markets are scarce. Therefore, understanding how information affects welfare and revenues in these markets is of fundamental interest. We introduce new statistical concepts, k- and k-m-dispersion, for...