We review the issues involved in designing a mechanism for allocating resource rights. We focus on the case of exploration and development rights for oil and gas leases in U.S. federal lands to highlight the tradeoffs at play. The main issues concern the design of the lease contract, the design...

This paper extends the theory of legal cartels to a.liated private value and common value environments, and applies the theory to explain joint bidding patterns in U.S. federal government o.shore oil and gas lease auctions. We show that e.cient collusion is always possible in private value...

This paper describes an ongoing research project, in which we examine recent trends in bidding for offshore oil and gas leases, and the exploration and development of leases after they are sold. We review empirical findings regarding bidder participation and bidding for the period 1954 through...

We characterize an optimal mechanism for a seller with one unit of a good facing N ≥ 3 buyers and a single competitor who sells another identical unit in a second-price auction. Buyers who do not get the seller's good compete in the competitor's subsequent auction. The mechanism features...

The paper analyzes a first price, sealed bid auction with a random reservation price where the object has an unknown common value, but one buyer has better information than the others. We permit the reservation price to be correlated with the information of the informed buyer, which reflects...

We study equilibria in second price auctions when bidders are independently and privately informed about both their values and participation costs and their joint distributions across bidders are not necessarily identical. We show that there always exists an equilibrium in this general setting...