Opaque products enable service providers to hide specific characteristics of their service fulfillment from the customer until after purchase. Prominent examples include internet-based service providers selling airline tickets without defining details, such as departure time or operating...

We study auction design when parties cannot commit themselves to the mechanism. The seller may change the rules of the game and the buyers choose their outside option at all stages. We assume that the seller has a leading role in equilibrium selection at any stage of the game. Stationary...

We consider second-price and first-price auctions in the symmetric independent private values framework. We modify the standard model by the assumption that the bidders have reference-based utility, where a publicly announced reserve price has some influence on the reference point. It turns out...

This paper studies the evolutionary stability of the unique Nash equilibrium of a first price sealed bid auction. It is shown that the Nash equilibrium is not asymptotically stable under payoff monotonic dynamics for arbitrary initial popu- lations. In contrast, when the initial population...

The importance of auction theory has gained increased recognition in the scientific community, the latest recognition being the award of the Nobel price to Vickrey and Mirrlees. Auction theory has been used in quite different fields, both theoretically and empirically. This paper connects recent...

Unique-lowest sealed-bid auctions are auctions in which participation is endogenous and the winning bid is the lowest bid among all unique bids. Such auctions admit very many Nash equilibria (NEs) in pure and mixed strategies. The two-bidders' auction is similar to the Hawk-Dove game, which...

Combinatorial auctions permitting bids on bundles of items have been developed to remedy the exposure problem associated with single-item auctions. Given winning bundle prices a set of item prices is called market clearing or equilibrium if all the winning bids are greater than or equal and if...

This paper highlights connections between the discrete and continuous approaches to optimal auction design with single and multi-dimensional types. We provide an interpretaion of an optimal auction design problem in terms of a linear program that is an instance of a parametric shortest path...

This paper formalizes a widely discussed peer effect entitled 'acting white'. 'Acting White' is modeled as a two audience signaling quandary: signals that induce highe wages can be signals that induce peer group rejection. Without peer effects, the equilibrium involve all ability types choosing...

Sales force management decisions belong to the major issues considered in marketing research. Among others, the alignment of sales territories has been one of the main field of work for years. Recent results have reported a strong impact of the alignment of sales territories on profit, and,...