Several European countries and many Japanese local governments began including endogenous minimum prices (EMPs) in first-price auctions (FPAs) in their public procurements. The EMP is calculated based on its relation to the average of all bids or to some lowest bids. Any bid lower than the EMP...

This paper reports the theoretical and experimental results of auctions for public construction in which firms cut corners. We show that the winning bids and the winner's quality choices of the constructed buildings are both zero in equilibria if there are at least two firms whose initial cash...

Potential bidders respond to a seller’s choice of auction mechanism for a common-value or affiliated-values asset by endogenous decisions whether to incur an information-acquisition cost (and observe a private estimate), or forgo competing. Privately informed participants decide whether to...

Using data on one-shot games, we investigate the assumption that players respond to underlying expectations about their opponent's behavior. In our laboratory experiments, subjects play a set of 14 two-person 3x3 games, and state first order beliefs about their opponent's behavior. The sets of...

This paper reports experiments that elicit subjects' initial responses to 16 dominancesolvable two-person guessing games. The structure is publicly announced except for varying payoff parameters, to which subjects are given free access, game by game, through an interface that records their...

Potential bidders respond to a seller's choice of auction mechanism for a common-value or affiliated-values asset by endogenous decisions whether to incur an information-acquisition cost (and observe a private estimate), or forgo competing. Privately informed participants decide whether to incur...

We examine auction data to determine if bid rigging presents in procurement auctions for paving works in Ibaraki City, Osaka, Japan. We first show that sporadic bidding wars are caused by the participation ofpotential outsiders. Assuming that the ring is all-inclusive if the auction is not the...

Auctions are a popular and prevalent form of trading mechanism, despite the restriction that the seller cannot price-discriminate among potential buyers. To understand why this is the case, we consider an auction-like environment in which a seller with an indivisible object negotiates with two...

We consider a two good world where an individual i with income mi has utility function u (x, y), where x ∈ [0, ∞) and y ∈ {0, 1}. We first derive the valuation (maximum price that he is willing to pay for the object) for good y as a function of his income. Then we consider the following...

This paper analyzes an all-pay auction where the winner is determined according to the sum of the bid and a handicap endowed to all players. The bidding strategy in equilibrium is then explicitly derived as a “piecewise affine transformation” of the equilibrium strategy in an all-pay auction...