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 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...

We analyze the possibility of efficient trade with informationally interdependent valuations and with a dispersed ownership. A crucial role is played by the sign of the derivatives that measure how valuation functions depend on others’ signals. If valuations are increasing functions of other...

In our framework, when a buyer does not obtain the auctioned object, he is no longer indifferent about the identity of the winner (i.e., eyternal effects are present). Buyer i's preferences are characterized by an N-dimensional vector t^i = (t1^i, t2^i,..,tN^i). The coordinate ti^i can be...

We consider an auction with risk neutral agents having independent private valuations for several heterogenous objects. Most of the literature on revenue-maximizing auctions has focused on the sale of one good or on the sale of several identical units (thus yielding one-dimensional informational...

We briefly survey several insights about value and revenue maximization in multi-object auctions and apply them to the German (and Austrian) UMTS auction. In particular, we discuss in detail the exposure probelm that caused firms in Germany to pay almost Euro 20 billion for nothing.