We study auction design in the standard symmetric independent private values environment, where the seller lacks the commitment power to withhold an unsold object off the market. The seller has a single object and can conduct an infinite sequence of standard auctions with reserve prices to...

I study an auction format called penny auctions. In these auctions, every bid increases the price by a small amount, but it is costly to place a bid. The auction ends if more than some predetermined amount of time has passed since the last bid. Outcomes of real penny auctions are surprising:...

I study a repeated mechanism design problem where a revenue-maximizing monopolist sells a fixed number of service slots to randomly arriving buyers with private values and increasing exit rates. In addition to characterizing the fully optimal mechanism, I study the optimal mechanisms in two...

We present a hidden Markov model of discrete strategic heterogeneity and learning in first price independent private values auctions. The model includes three latent bidding rules: constant absolute mark-up, constant percentage mark-up, and strategic best response. Rule switching probabilities...

In a multi-stage contest known as a two-player race, players display two fundamental behaviors: (1) the laggard will make a last stand in order to avoid the cost of losing; and (2) the player who is ahead will defend his lead if it is threatened. Last stand behavior, in particular, contrasts...

This paper introduces a class of contest models in which each player decides when to stop a privately observed Brownian motion with drift and incurs costs depending on his stopping time. The player who stops his process at the highest value wins a prize. We prove existence and uniqueness of a...

We consider a dynamic auction problem motivated by the traditional single-leg, multi-period revenue management problem. A seller with C units to sell faces potential buyers with unit demand who arrive and depart over the course of T time periods. The time at which a buyer arrives, her value for...

We examine an environment where goods and privately informed buyers arrive stochastically to a market. A seller in this setting faces a sequential allocation problem with a changing population. We characterize the set of incentive compatible allocation rules and provide a generalized revenue...

We consider a simplified model of finance market where two players carry on direct multistage bidding with risky assets (shares). One of the players (the insider) is informed on the liquidation price of a share, the other player knows its probability distribution only. It is shown that the...

This paper presents a unified framework for characterizing symmetric equilibrium in simultaneous move, two-player, rank-order contests with complete information, in which each player’s strategy generates direct or indirect affine “spillover” effects that depend on the rank-order of her...