We study the effects of improvements in market transparency on eBay on seller exit and continuing sellers’ behavior. An improvement in market transparency by reducing strategic bias in buyer ratings led to a significant increase in buyer valuation especially of sellers rated poorly prior to...

Inspired by some spectrum auctions, we consider a stylized license auction with incumbents and one entrant. Whereas the entrant values only the bundle of several units (synergy), incumbents are subject to non-increasing demand. The seller proactively encourages entry and restricts incumbent...

If bidders are uncertain whether the auctioneer sticks to the announced reserve, some bidders respond by not bidding, speculating that the auctioneer may revoke the reserve. However, the reserve inadvertently signals the auctioneer's type, which drives a unique separating and a multitude of...

The present paper reconsiders the inside innovators’ licensing problem under incomplete information. Employing an optimal mechanism design approach, we show that, contrary to what is claimed in the literature, the optimal mechanism may prescribe fixed fees, royalty rates lower than the cost...

We consider a licensing mechanism for process innovations that combines a license auction with royalty contracts to those who lose the auction. Firms' bids are dual signals of their cost reductions: the winning bid signals the own cost reduction to rival oligopolists, whereas the losing bid...

This paper reconsiders the licensing of a common value innovation to a downstream duopoly, assuming a dual licensing scheme that combines a first-price license auction with royalty contracts for losers. Prior to bidding firms observe imperfect signals of the expected cost reduction; after the...

We consider a model of oligopolistic firms that have private information about their cost structure. Prior to competing in the market a competitive advantage, i.e., a cost reducing technology, is allocated to a subset of the firms by means of a multi-object auction. After the auction either all...

Electronic commerce has grown extraordinarily over the years, with online auctions being extremely successful forms of trade. Those auctions come in a variety of different formats, such as the Buy-It-Now auction format on eBay, that allows sellers to post prices at which buyers can purchase a...

Most prior theoretical and experimental work involving auction choice has assumed bidders only find out their value after making a choice of which autcion to enter. In this paper we examine whether or not subjects knowing their value prior to making an auction choice impacts their choice...

We consider procurement of an innovation from heterogeneous sellers. Innovations are random but depend on unobservable effort and private information. We compare two procurement mechanisms where potential sellers first bid in an auction for admission to an innovation contest. After the contest,...