We examine the role of competition and mergers in bargaining by embedding a performance game, in which retail prices are determined by competition, into an axiomatic bilateral bargaining model, in which suppliers and retailers negotiate wholesale terms. We prove existence and uniqueness of what...

Following merger, an optimal mechanism discriminates against merging bidders with higher reserve prices and by allocating more often towards non-merging bidders. In this setting, we show that mergers always harm the auctioneer, benefit non-merging bidders, can increase total surplus, and have...

In a private values, open auction, we show that bidder surplus can be expressed as a simple difference between unconditional moments of order statistics. The strength of the result is its simplicity and generality, as we dispense with the typical assumptions of independence and/or symmetry. We...