We study auctions for an invisible object. The outcome of the auction influences the future interaction among agents. The impact of that interaction on agent's is assumed to be a function of the agent's valuations. While agent's i valuation is private information to i, the other valuations are...

In diesem Jahr wurden die beiden Ökonomen William Vickrey und James Mirrlees für ihre bahnbrechenden Forschungen auf dem Gebiet der "Informationsökonomie" mit dem Nobelpreis für Wirtschaftswissenschaften geehrt. Dieses Papier gibt einen Überblick über die Arbeiten von William Vickrey.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), considered by some to be the greatest German writer, employed a number of sophisticated strategies in his dealings with publishers. None of them is as intriguing as the one appearing in Goethe's letter, dated January 16, 1797, to the publisher Vieweg...

We survey the recent European UMTS license auctions and compare their outcomes with the predictions of a simple model that emphasizes future market structure as a main determinant of valuations for licenses. Since the main goal of most spectrum allocation procedures is economic efficiency, and...

We study the possibility of efficient trade with informationally interdependent valuations. In a model based on the bilateral trade situation studied in Myerson and Satterthwaite (1983) efficient trade is only possible in trivial cases where the seller's valuation always exceeds the buyer's...

We study contests where several privately informed agents bid for a price. All bidders bear a cost of bidding that is an increasing function of their bids, and, moreover, bids may be capped. We show that, regardless of the number of bidders, if agents have linear or concave cost functions then...

This paper discusses some economic aspects of the recent German and Austrian UMTS license auctions. We consider a stylized model of the open ascending auction with incomplete information and market externalities. It is shown that, if the dominant incumbent is not successful in pushing the...

We study efficient, Bayes-Nash incentive compatible mechanisms in a social choice setting that allows for informational and allocative externalities. We show that such mechanisms exist only if a congruence condition relating private and social rates of information substitution is satisfied. If...

We consider a social choice setting with multidimensional signals and interdependent valuations. Such frameworks have been recently and increasingly used in order to study multi-object auctions. We obtain concise characterizations of ex-post implementable (not necessarily efficient) social...