We compare two commonly used mechanisms in procurement: auctions and negotiations. The execution of the procurement mechanism is delegated to an agent of the buyer. The agent has private information about the buyer s preferences and may collude with one of the sellers. We provide a precise...

We compare the effects of information acquisition during a descending auction with its static counterpart, the first-price sealed-bid auction. In a framework with heterogeneous prior information, we show that an equilibrium with information acquisition exists in both auction formats. We show...

We analyze the bidding behavior in a strictly descending multi-unit auction where the price decreases continuously without going back to the initial start price once an object is sold. We prove that any equilibrium in the multi-unit descending auction is inefficient. We derive a symmetric...

We compare two commonly used mechanisms in procurement: auctions and negotiations. The execution of the procurement mechanism is delegated to an agent of the buyer. The agent has private information about the buyer’s preferences and may collude with one of the sellers. We provide a precise...

Liberalization of network industries frequently separates the network from the other parts of the industry. This is important in particular for the electricity industry where private firms invest into generation facilities, while network investments usually are controlled by regulators. We...

Liberalization of network industries frequently separates the network from the other parts of the industry. This is important in particular for the electricity industry where private firms invest into generation facilities, while net- work investments usually are controlled by regulators. We...

We propose a sequential auction mechanism for a single object in which the seller jointly determines the allocation and the disclosure policy. A sequential disclosure rule is shown to implement an ascending price auction in which each losing bidder learns his true valuation, but the winning...

Recently, the combinatorial clock auction has become more and more common in the auctioning of telecommunication licenses. Although the auction design is complex, the promise is that bidding becomes simple - truthtelling is close to optimal. We show that this claim is too strong. The auction...