We study optimal mechanisms for a utilitarian designer who seeks to assign a finite number of goods to a group of ex ante heterogeneous agents with unit demand. The agents have heterogeneous marginal utilities of money, which may naturally arise in environments where agents have different wealth...

We say that a society has a weak norm against lying if, all other things being equal, agents rather lie in such a way that they do not get caught. We show that if this is the case, and it usually is, then Bayesian monotonicity is no longer a constraint in implementation and all incentive...

In Buy-It-Now (BIN, hereafter) auctions, sellers can make a "take-it-or-leave-it" price offer (BIN price) prior to an auction. We analyse experimentally how eBay sellers set BIN prices and whether they benefit from offering them. Using the real eBay environment in the laboratory, we find that...

In Buy-It-Now auctions, sellers can post a take-it-or-leave-it price offer prior to an auction. While the literature almost exclusively looks at buyers in such combined mechanisms, the current paper summarizes results from the sellers' point of view. Buy-It-Now auctions are complex mechanisms...

We consider generalized sender-receiver games in which the sender also has a decision to make, but this decision does not directly affect the receiver. We introduce specific perfect Bayesian equilibria, in which the players agree on a joint decision after that a message has been sent ("talk and...

We study auction design when parties cannot commit to the mechanism. The seller may change the rules of the game any number of times and the buyers may choose their outside option at any stage of the game. A dynamic consistency condition and an optimality condition property are defined to...

Overbidding in auctions has been attributed to e.g. risk aversion, loser regret, level-k, and cursedness, relying on varying identifying assumptions. I argue that "type projection" organizes these findings and largely captures observed behavior. Type projection formally models that people tend...

Anchoring is one of the most studied and robust behavioral biases, but there is little knowledge about its persistence in strategic settings. This article studies the role of anchoring bias in private-value auctions. We test experimentally two different anchor types. The announcement of a random...

Overbidding in sealed-bid second-price auctions (SPAs) has been shown to be persistent and associated with cognitive ability. We study experimentally to what extent cross-game learning can reduce overbidding in SPAs, taking into account cognitive skills. Employing an order-balanced design, we...

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...