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...

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 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 auction mechanism that excludes overoptimistic bidders inspired by the rules of the procurement auctions adopted by several Japanese local governments. Our theoretical and experimental results suggest that the endogenous exclusion rule reduces the probability of suffering...

A seller is selling multiple objects to a set of agents, who can buy at most one object. Each agent's preference over (object, payment) pairs need not be quasilinear. The seller considers the following desiderata for her mechanism, which she terms desirable: (1) strategy-proofness, (2) ex-post...

In this paper we analyse scoring auctions with general non-quasilinear scoring rules. We assume that cost function of each firm is additively separable in quality and type. In sharp contrast to the recent results in the literature we show the following. (i) Equilibria in scoring auctions can be...

This paper analyses the incentives to adopt cost-reducing technology by firms in a horizontally differentiated industry. In our model there are several suppliers of a new technology. The extent of the cost reduction depends on the quality of the new technology. A firm has to buy the technology...

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...