We consider auction environments in which bidders must incur a cost to learn their valuations and study the optimal selling mechanisms in such environments. These mechanisms specify for each period, as a function of the bids in previous periods, which new potential buyers should be asked to bid....

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 bidders’ types and possibly interdependent valuations, the seller’s problem can be...

Based on an axiomatically derived provision rule allowing community members to endogenously determine which, if any, public project should be provided, we perform experiments where (i) not all parties benefit from provision, and (ii) the projects' costs can be negative. In the tradition of legal...

Theoretically and experimentally, we generalize the analysis of acquiring a company (Samuelson and Bazerman 1985) by allowing for competition of both, buyers and sellers. Naivety of both is related to the idea that higher prices exclude worse qualities. While competition of naive buyers...

Although one may hope to achieve equality of stated profits without enforcing it, one may not trust in such voluntary equality seeking and rather try to impose rules (of bidding) guaranteeing it. Our axiomatic approach is based on envy-free net trades according to bids which, together with the...

We compare, on the basis of a procedurally fair provision point mechanism, bids for a public project from which some gain and some lose with bids for a less efficient public project from which all gain. In the main treatment, participants independently decide which one, if any, of the public...

Bidding rules that guarantee procedural fairness may induce more equilibrium bidding and moderate other-regarding concerns. In our experiment, we assume commonly known true values and only two bidders to implement a best-case scenario for other-regarding concerns. The two-by-two factorial design...

Unanimous voting as the fundamental procedural source of political legitimacy grants veto power to each individual. We present an axiomatic characterization of a class of bidding processes to spell out the underlying egalitarian values for collective projects of a productive state. At heart of...