We consider a model of search when the distribution of prices (wages) is unknown. The effect of changing the objective function from minimizing expected cost to maximizing expected utility is examined.

A widespread practice, particularly in public-sector procurement and dispersal, is to subsidize a class of competitors believed to be at an economic disadvantage. Arguments for such policies vary, but they typically assume that benefits of subsidization must be large enough to outweigh a...

In analyzing bidding, modeling matters. This paper is a critical analysis of the models available to aid competitive bidding decision making---bidding strategy and auction design---in real transactions. After an introductory overview, this paper describes the contexts in which auctions arise,...

There is interest in designing simultaneous auctions for situations such as the recent FCC radio spectrum auctions, in which the value of assets to a bidder depends on which other assets he or she wins. In such auctions, bidders may wish to submit bids for combinations of assets. When this is...

We present an alternative abstraction of an English (oral ascending) auction to the standard, in Milgrom and Weber (1982), that accords more closely with practices in some auction markets. In particular, the assumptions that exits are irrevocable and necessarily public are dropped, making...

The one-switch property states that the preference between any two lotteries switches at most once as wealth increases. Working within the expected utility framework, we extend the one-switch notion to the multiattribute case and identify the families of multiattribute utility functions that are...

An important managerial question is the choice of the pricing rule. We study whether this choice depends on the uncertainty about the number of participating bidders by comparing expected revenues under discriminatory and uniform pricing within an auction model with affiliated values, stochastic...

An important characteristic of any offer is the deadline at which it expires. We consider an ultimatum deadline game in which the proposer's decision variable is the offer deadline, while the responder faces a standard finite-horizon search problem. We show that the responder's strategy is...

The analysis of a risky project should take into account not only uncertainties about the return from that project ("project risk"), but also uncertainties associated with other ongoing projects and with exogenous factors that can impact final wealth ("background risk"). The presence of...

An important challenge in multiattribute decision analysis is the choice of an appropriate functional form for the utility function. We show that if a decision maker prefers more of any attribute to less and prefers to combine good lotteries with bad, as opposed to combining good with good and...