The most important issues in auction design are the traditional concerns of competition policy - preventing collusive, predatory, and entry-deterring behaviour. Ascending and uniform-price auctions are particularly vulnerable to these problems. The Anglo-Dutch auction - a hybrid of the...

We discuss the strong connections between auction theory and "standard" economic theory; we show that situations that do not at first sight look like auctions can be recast to use auction-theoretic techniques; and we argue that auction-theoretic tools and intuitions can provide useful arguments...

This paper provides an elementary, non-technical, survey of auction theory, by introducing and describing some of the critical papers in the subject. (The most important of these are reproduced in a companion book, The Economic Theory of Auctions, Paul Klemperer (ed.), Edward Elgar (pub.),...

The existence of a "bidding market" is commonly cited as a reason to tolerate the creation or maintenance of highly concentrated markets. We discuss three erroneous arguments to that effect: the "consultants' fallacy" that "market power is impossible," the "academics' fallacy" that (often)...