This paper characterizes the optimal first-price auction (FPA) and second-price auction (SPA) for selling rights, contracts, or licenses that involve ensuing payoff uncertainty for the winning bidder. The distribution of the random payoff is common knowledge, except that bidders have private...

A government officials' propensity to corruption, or corruptibility, can be affected by his intertemporal preference over job benefits. Through a dynamic model of rent-seeking behavior, this paper examines how endogenously determined corruptibility changes with monitoring intensity, salary...

We investigate the possibility of enhancing efficiency by awarding premiums to a set of highest bidders in an English auction— in a setting that extends Maskin and Riley (1984, <I>Econometrica</I> 52: 1473-1518) in three aspects: (i) the seller can be risk averse, (ii) the bidders can have...</i>

We analyze sequential Dutch and Vickrey auctions where risk averse, or risk preferring, bidders may have heterogeneous risk exposures. We derive and characterize a pure strategy equilibrium of both auctions for arbitrary number of identical objects. A sufficient, and to certain extent necessary,...

This paper characterizes the optimal first-price auction (FPA) and second-price auction (SPA) for selling rights, contracts, or licenses that involve ensuing payoff uncertainty for the winning bidder. The distribution of the random payoff is common knowledge, except that bidders have private...

A government officials' propensity to corruption, or corruptibility, can be affected by his intertemporal preference over job benefits. Through a dynamic model of rent-seeking behavior, this paper examines how endogenously determined corruptibility changes with monitoring intensity, salary...