One of the goals of procurement is to establish a competitive price while affording the buyer some flexibility in selecting the suppliers to deal with. Reverse auctions do not have this flexibility, because it is the auction rules and not the buyer that determines the winner. In practice,...

We investigate the effect of regret-related feedback information on bidding behavior in sealed-bid first-price auctions. Two types of regret are possible in this auction format. A winner of the auction may regret paying too much relative to the second highest bid, and a loser may regret missing...

Not all Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) federal oil leases receive the same number of bids. Indeed, while some leases receive over a dozen bids, many others receive no bids at all. This leads to uncertainty in the number of bids a lease will receive---uncertainty of potential concern to both...

We present an example of risk neutral bid-taker and bidders in which the bid-taker obtains a greater expected revenue from auctioning an inefficient contract than from auctioning an efficient contract. This occurs because in going from the efficient contract to an inefficient (but almost...

This paper presents an equilibrium explanation for the persistence of naive bidding. Specifically, we consider a common value auction in which a "naive" bidder (who ignores the winner's curse) competes against a fully rational bidder. We show that the naive bidder earns higher equilibrium...

Concurrent auctions of several objects are traditionally analyzed as if they were independent single-object auctions. Such an approximation may be very crude if bidders have budgetary restrictions, capacity constraints, or, in general, have non-linear utility functions. This paper presents a...

While most models of auctions and competitive bidding assume that each bidder's utility for an outcome depends only on his own profit, we allow the utility to also depend on any regret that a bidder suffers after the fact and characterize when and how this affects bidding. Specifically, a winner...

Low-revenue equilibria allow participants in an auction to obtain goods at prices lower than would prevail in a competitive market. These outcomes are generated as perfect equilibria of ascending-bid, multiunit auctions. We show that these equilibria are possible under mild...

Each year, multi-stage auctions of one form or another sell or let billions of dollars worth of goods and contracts. Yet despite the significance of such auctions, the existing theory of auctions and competitive bidding fails to explain why a bid taker might prefer a multi-stage auction to a,...

Auctions and bidding models are attracting an ever increasing amount of attention. The Stark and Rothkopf (Stark, R. M., M. H. Rothkopf. 1979. Competitive bidding: a comprehensive bibliography. Oper. Res. 27 (2) 364--390.) bibliography includes approximately 500 works in the area. Additional...