This paper studies markets plagued with asymmetric information on the quality of traded goods. In Akerlof's setting, sellers are better informed than buyers. In contrast, we examine cases where buyers are better informed than sellers. This creates an inverse adverse selection problem: The market...

Many organizations use procurement tenders to buy large amounts of goods and services. Especially in the public sector the use of these reverse auctions has grown rapidly over the past decades. For the (reverse) unit price auction experience as well as theory has shown that they can attract...

Where markets are insufficiently competitive, governments can intervene by auctioning licenses to operate or by forcing divestitures. The Dutch government has done exactly that, organizing auctions to redistribute tenancy rights for high-way gasoline stations and forcing the divestiture of...

In this note, we experimentally examine the relative performance of price-only auctions and multi-attribute auctions. We do so in procurement settings where the buyer can give the winning bidder incentives to exert effort on non-price dimensions after the auction. Both auctions theoretically...

The popularity of open ascending auctions is often attributed to the fact that openly observable bidding allows to aggregate dispersed information. Another reason behind the frequent utilization of open auction formats may be that they activate revenue enhancing biases. In an experiment, we...

We experimentally examine the collusive properties of two commonly used auctions: the English auction (EN) and the first-price sealed-bid auction (FPSB). In theory, both tacit and overt collusion are always incentive compatible in EN while both can be incentive compatible in FPSB if the auction...

We analyze the effects of mergers in first-price sealed-bid auctions on bidders' equilibrium bidding functions and on revenue. We also study the incentives of bidders to merge given the private information they have. We develop two models, depending on how after-merger valuations are created. In...

The objects for sale in most auctions possess both private and common value elements. This salient feature has not yet been incorporated into a strategic analysis of equilibrium bidding behaviour. This paper reports such an analysis for a stylised model in which bidders receive a private value...

This paper provides a structural empirical analysis of Dutch auctions of houseplants at the flower auction in Aalsmeer, the Netherlands. The data set is unique for Dutch auctions in the sense that it includes observations of all losing bids in an interval adjacent to the winning bid. The size of...

Multi-unit ascending auctions allow for equilibria in which bidders strategically reduce their demand and split the market at low prices. At the same time, they allow for preemptive bidding by incumbent bidders in a coordinated attempt to exclude entrants from the market. We consider an...