Several `smart market' mechanisms have recently appeared in the literature. These mechanisms combine a computer network that collects bids from agents with a central computer that selects a schedule of bids to fill based upon maximization of revenue or trading surplus. Potential problems exist...

Auctions in which individuals can purchase more than one unit of the good being sold differ in striking ways from multi-unit auctions in which individuals may purchase only one unit. The uniform price auction in particular frequently yields Nash equilibria in which bidders underbid for their...

We model credit contracting and bidding in a first-price sealed-bid auction when bidder valuation and wealth are private information. An efficient separating equilibrium exists only if the wealth levels of both bidder types are sufficiently different. If not, high-valuation bidders signal by...

A seller of an item faces a potential buyer whose valuation of the item depends on two private signals. It is well known that when there are informational externalities and the buyer's private signals arrive all at once, it is impossible to implement an efficient sale. I show that if the buyer's...

This paper studies `knockout' auctions, typically organized by bidding rings, in which the winning bidder makes side-payments to all losing bidders. These side-payments provide an incentive for the ring members to bid higher than they would have in an identical public auction. As a consequence,...

This paper studies sequential auctions of licences to participate in a symmetric market game. Assuming that the rate at which industry profits decrease with repeated entry is not too large, at the unique solution either a single firm preempts entry altogether or entry occurs in every stage,...

Despite the complexity of the first price auction in the general asymmetric case, analytical results have started to emerge in the literature. Authors have also searched to gain insights by computing numerical estimates of the equilibria for some probability distributions of the valuations. This...

We derive equilibrium bidding strategies in divisible good auctions for asymmetrically informed risk neutral and risk averse bidders when there is random noncompetitive demand. The equilibrium bid schedules contain both strategic considerations and explicit allowances for the winner's curse....

A phantom bidding model is analyzed for a sale auction. The following issues are addressed: the effects of phantom bidding on overall social welfare and buyers' profits. It is shown that social welfare may increase or decrease as the auctioneer switches from the fixed reserve price policy to...

In the model presented, a buyer uses competitive bidding to facilitate her purchase of a good (the primary good of the exchange). Not included in the original purchase is the possible procurement of a good related to the original purchase: the supplementary good. The primary and supplementary...