Europe has taken the global lead in the issuance of third generation (3G) licences for mobile telecommunications according to the UMTS/IMT-2000 family of standards. We survey the recent European UMTS licence auctions and compare their outcomes with the predictions of a simple auction model that...

We study a contest with multiple, nonidentical prizes. Participants are privately informed about a parameter (ability) affecting their costs of effort. The contestant with the highest effort wins the first prize, the contestant with the second-highest effort wins the second prize, and so on...

In a unified framework, we survey the recent literature on partnership dissolution with interdependent values. Contrary to the private-values case, where the main obstacle hindering the construction of efficient trading mechanisms is the asymmetry in initial endowments, we find that...

We analyze maximization of revenue in the dynamic and stochastic knapsack problem where a given capacity needs to be allocated by a given deadline to sequentially arriving agents. Each agent is described by a two-dimensional type that reflects his capacity requirement and his willingness to pay...

We study an elimination tournament with heterogenous contestants whose ability is common-knowledge. Each pair-wise match is modeled as an all-pay auction where the winner gets the right to compete at the next round. Equilibrium efforts are in mixed strategies, yielding rather complex play...

Agents in a finite two-sided market make costly investments and are then matched assortatively based on these investments. Besides signaling complementary types, investments also generate benefits for partners. We shed light on quantitative properties of the equilibrium investment behavior. The...

Agents in a finite two-sided market make costly investments and are then matched assortatively based on these investments. Besides signaling complementary types, investments also generate benefits for partners. We shed light on quantitative properties of the equilibrium investment behavior. The...

Agents in a finite two-sided market are matched assortatively, based on costly investments. Besides signaling private, complementary types, investments generate direct benefits for partners. We explore quantitative properties of the equilibrium investment behavior. The bilateral external...

We study the allocation of several heterogenous, commonly ranked objects to impatient agents with privately known characteristics who arrive sequentially according to a Poisson or renewal process. We analyze and compare the policies that maximize either welfare or revenue. We focus on two cases:...

We study the effects of allocative and informational externalities in (multi-object) auctions and related mechanisms. Such externalities naturally arise in models that embed auctions in larger economic contexts. In particular, they appear when there is downstream interaction among bidders after...