In this paper, we examine the optimal mechanism design of selling an indivisible object to one regular buyer and one publicly known buyer, where inter-buyer resale cannot be prohibited. The resale market is modeled as a stochastic ultimatum bargaining game between the two buyers. We fully...

We study mechanism design in non-Bayesian settings of incomplete information, when the designer has no information about the players, and the players have arbitrary, heterogeneous, first-order, and possibilistic beliefs about their opponents' payoff types.

This note considers equilibrium selection in common-value second-price auctions with two bidders. We show that for each ex post equilibrium in continuous and undominated strategies, a sequence of “almost common-value” auctions can be constructed such that each of them possesses a unique...

The Babylonian bridal auction, described by Herodotus, is regarded as one of the earliest uses of an auction in history. Yet, to our knowledge, the literature lacks a formal equilibrium analysis of this auction. We provide such an analysis for the two-player case with complete and incomplete...

Prosper, today the second largest social lending marketplace with nearly 1.5 million members and $380 million in funded loans, employed an auction mechanism amongst lenders to finance each borrower's loan until 2010. Given that a basic premise of social lending is cheap loans for borrowers, how...

We study the second best in a single unit sale to two bidders. This is the allocation that maximizes the expected social surplus subject to the biddersʼ incentive compatible constraints when the first best is not implementable. We prove that Maskinʼs (1992) result that any first best...

This paper investigates the perfect Bayesian equilibrium in an ascending-price core-selecting auction, which is recently used in some countriesʼ spectrum license auctions. We suppose that there are two identical items, two small bidders, and one large bidder. The small bidders demand only one...

We analyze an environment in which biddersʼ private values change over time due to both private investments and exogenous shocks. We demonstrate that a highly-decentralized mechanism achieves efficiency. The mechanism requires a stage of costly public announcements (i.e., signaling) to induce...

We investigate a private value auction in which a single “entrant” on winning imposes a negative externality on two “regular” bidders. In an English auction when all bidders are active, “regular” bidders free ride, exiting before price reaches their values. In a first-price...

I study a 2-bidder infinitely repeated IPV first-price auction without transfers, communication, or public randomization, where each bidderʼs valuation can assume, in each of the (statistically independent) stage games, one of three possible values. Under certain distributional assumptions, the...