A widespread practice, particularly in public-sector procurement and dispersal, is to subsidize a class of competitors believed to be at an economic disadvantage. Arguments for such policies vary, but they typically assume that benefits of subsidization must be large enough to outweigh a...

In analyzing bidding, modeling matters. This paper is a critical analysis of the models available to aid competitive bidding decision making---bidding strategy and auction design---in real transactions. After an introductory overview, this paper describes the contexts in which auctions arise,...

There is interest in designing simultaneous auctions for situations such as the recent FCC radio spectrum auctions, in which the value of assets to a bidder depends on which other assets he or she wins. In such auctions, bidders may wish to submit bids for combinations of assets. When this is...

We present an alternative abstraction of an English (oral ascending) auction to the standard, in Milgrom and Weber (1982), that accords more closely with practices in some auction markets. In particular, the assumptions that exits are irrevocable and necessarily public are dropped, making...

A wide variety of auction models exhibit close relationships between the winner's expected profit and the expected difference between the highest and second-highest order statistics of bidders' information, and between expected revenue and the second-highest order statistic of bidders' expected...

We analyze the preferences of a risk-averse seller over the class of "standard" auctions with symmetric and risk-neutral bidders. Assuming that buyers' private signals are independently distributed, we find that a sealed-bid first-price auction with an appropriately set reserve price is...

We attempt a more realistic abstraction of an English (oral ascending) auction than the standard, in Milgrom and Weber [1982]. In particular, the assumptions that exists are irrevocable and necessarily public are dropped. In the model, the price rises in a stylization of an auctioneer...