Competitive bidding (as auctions) is commonly used to procure goods and services. Public buyers are often mandated by law to adopt competitive procedures to ensure transparency and promote full competition. Recent theoretical literature, however, suggests that open competition can perform poorly...

We provide a model of bookbuilding in IPOs, in which the issuer can choose to ration shares. We consider two allocation rules. Under share dispersion, before informed investors submit their bids, they know that, in the aggregate, winning bidders will receive only a fraction of their demand. We...

This paper studies revenue-maximizing mechanisms for a monopolist who expects her buyers to resell in a secondary market. We consider two modes of resale: the first is to a third party who does not participate in the primary market; the second is inter-bidders resale, where the winner in the...

We study sequential and single-round uniform-price auctions with affiliated values. We derive symmetric equilibrium for the auction in which k1 objects are sold in the first round and k2 in the second round, with and without revelation of the first-round winning bids. We demonstrate that...

We study sealed-bid auctions with financial externalities, i.e., auctions in which losers’ utilities depend on how much the winner pays. In the unique symmetric equilibrium of the first-price sealed-bid auction (FPSB), larger financial externalities result in lower bids and in a lower expected...

We study uniform price auctions using a dataset which includes individual bidders' demand schedules in Finnish Treasury auctions during the period 1992-99. Average underpricing amounts to .041% of face value. Theory suggests that underpricing may result from monopsonistic market power. We...

A buyer with downward slopping demand faces a number of unit supply sellers. The paper characterizes optimal auctions in this setting. For the symmetric case, a uniform auction (with price equal to lowest rejected offer) is optimal when complemented with reserve prices for different quantities...

Uniform-price auctions of a divisible good in fixed supply admit underpricing equilibria, where bidders submit high inframarginal bids to prevent competition on prices. The seller can obstruct this behavior by tilting her supply schedule and making the amount of divisible good on offer change...

This paper develops a theory of multiple unit auctions with short squeezes in the post- auction market. This is especially relevant for financial and commodity markets where players may enter the auction with established forward positions. We study how a potential short squeeze impacts on...

Time overruns are common in public works and are not confined to inherently complex tasks. One explanation advanced in this paper is that bidders can undergo unpredictable changes in production costs which generate an option value of waiting. By exploiting the real-option approach, we examine...