The effects of information on market design are explored in a simple setting where firms have private information about their correlated fixed costs and the government aims to maximize its expected revenue conditional on achieving efficient allocations. Government revenues are higher when the...

A dynamic pricing model is studied where a seller of an asset faces a sequence of potential buyers whose valuation distribution is unknown to the seller. The seller learns more about the distribution in the selling process and becomes less optimistic as the object remains unsold. We characterize...

We consider the equilibrium choice of selling mechanisms by competing firms. For a model where a number of sellers choose sequentially between any two selling mechanisms, there is a unique (subgame perfect) equilibrium under fairly natural assumptions about the monotonicity and differences of...

Two popular selling methods are compared in a one-period correlated private-values model. The seller of an object has to decide whether to sell it by posting a fixed price or by an auction. Without auctioning costs, an auction (with a reserve price) is always preferable. With positive auctioning...

A model is presented in which market prices systematically understate fundamental values. The result follows from assumptions that the market is organized along auction lines with private information and is imperfect in that owners are occasionally forced to sell in order to raise cash for...

Will generous return policies in auctions benefit bidders? We investigate this issue using second-price common-value auctions. Theoretically, we find that the bidding equilibrium is unique unless returns are free, in which case there exist multiple equilibria with different implications for...

We consider a transaction costs model of sovereign debt buybacks in this paper. We show that both secret and publicly known buybacks are profitable for the debtor country. Furthermore, the government of the debtor country would like to spend all of its initial endowment to buy back its debt as...