We study the design of profit maximizing single unit auctions under the assumption that the seller needs to incur costs to contact prospective bidders and inform them about the auction. When bidders' types are independent (with^Mpossibly bidder-specific distributions) and their valuations are...

We study the design of profit maximizing single unit auctions under the assumption that the seller needs to incur costs to contact prospective bidders and inform them about the auction. With independent biddersï¾’ types and possibly interdependent valuations, the sellerï¾’s problem can...

This paper investigates the design of seller-optimal auctions when winning bidders can attempt to resell the good. In that case, the optimal allocation characterized by Myerson (1981) cannot be achieved without resale. I find a sufficient and necessary condition for sincere bidding given the...

This paper investigates the design of seller-optimal auctions when winning bidders can attempt to resell the good. In that case, the optimal allocation characterized by Myerson (1981) cannot be achieved without resale. I find a sufficient and necessary condition for sincere bidding given the...

We study optimal auctions when contacting prospective bidders is costly and the biddersï¾’ values are correlated. Although full surplus extraction is in general impossible, we can construct a search mechanism that fully extracts the surplus with an arbitrarily high probability.