The usual analysis of bidding in first-price auctions assumes that bidders know the distribution of valuations. We analyze first-price auctions in which bidders do not know the precise distribution of their competitors' valuations, but only the mean of the distribution. We propose a novel...

The paper presents a complete information model of bidding in second price sealed-bid and ascending-bid (English) auctions, in which potential buyers know the unit valuation of other bidders and may spitefully prefer that their rivals earn a lower surplus. Bidders with spiteful preferences...

We report results from experimental first-price, sealed-bid, all-pay auctions for a good with a common and known value. We observe bidding strategies in groups of two and three bidders and under two extreme information conditions. As predicted by the Nash equilibrium, subjects use mixed...

This paper studies the possibility of implementing Pareto optimal outcomes in the combinatorial auction setting where bidders may have budget constraints. I show that when the setting involves a single good, or multiple goods but with single-minded bidders, there is a unique mechanism, called...

I study the canonical private value auction model for a single good without the quasilinearity restriction. I assume only that bidders are risk averse and the indivisible good for sale is a normal good. I show that removing quasilinearity leads to qualitatively different solutions to the auction...

The Combinatorial Clock Auction (CCA) has frequently been used in recent spectrum auctions. It combines a dynamic clock phase and a one-off supplementary round. The winning allocation and the corresponding prices are determined by the VCG rules. These rules should encourage truthful bidding,...

Short-term electricity markets are key to an efficient production by generation units. We develop a two-period model to assess different bidding formats to determine for each bidding format the optimal bidding strategy of competitive generators facing price-uncertainty. We compare the results...

We study when equilibrium prices can aggregate information in an auction market with a large population of traders. Our main result identifies a property of information---the betweenness property---that is both necessary and sufficient for information aggregation. The characterization provides...

This paper develops a methodology for characterizing expected revenue from auctions when bidders' types come from an arbitrary distribution. In particular, types may be multidimensional, and there may be mass points in the distribution. One application extends existing revenue equivalence...

A crucial assumption in the optimal auction literature is that each bidder's valuation is known to be drawn from a unique distribution. In this paper we study the optimal auction problem allowing for ambiguity about the distribution of valuations. Agents may be ambiguity averse (modeled using...