Bidding in the last seconds or minutes of an auction is a common strategy in Internet auctions with fixed end-times. This paper examines the three explanations of late bidding in eBay auctions that survived the first scrutiny in Roth and Ockenfels (2002). There is no indication that late bidding...

We investigate the role of competition on the outcome of Austrian Treasury auctions. Austria's EU accession led to an increase in the number of banks participating in treasury auctions. We use structural estimates of bidders' private values to examine the effect of increased competition on...

We investigate the role of competition on the outcome of Austrian Treasury auctions. Austria's EU accession led to an increase in the number of banks participating in treasury auctions. We use structural estimates of bidders' private values to examine the effect of increased competition on...

This paper studies markets plagued with asymmetric information on the quality of traded goods. In Akerlof's setting, sellers are better informed than buyers. In contrast, we examine cases where buyers are better informed than sellers. This creates an inverse adverse selection problem: The market...

We consider a model of oligopolistic firms that have private information about their cost structure. Prior to competing in the market a competitive advantage, i.e., a cost reducing technology, is allocated to a subset of the firms by means of a multi-object auction. After the auction either all...

We consider procurement of an innovation from heterogeneous sellers. Innovations are random but depend on unobservable effort and private information. We compare two procurement mechanisms where potential sellers first bid in an auction for admission to an innovation contest. After the contest,...

We consider a multi-dimensional procurement problem in which sellers have private information about their costs and about a possible design flaw. The information about the design flaw is necessarily correlated. We solve for the optimal Bayesian procurement mechanism that implements the efficient...

We consider a budget-constrained mechanism designer who selects an optimal set of projects to maximize her utility. Projects may differ in their value for the designer, and their cost is private information. In this allocation problem, the quantity of procured projects is endogenously determined...

This paper studies optimal auction design when the seller can affect the buyers' valuations through an unobservable ex ante investment. The key insight is that the optimal mechanism may have the seller play a mixed investment strategy so as to create correlation between the otherwise...

Affiliation has been a prominent assumption in the study of economic models with statistical dependence. Despite its large number of applications, especially in auction theory, affiliation has limitations that are important to be aware of. This paper shows that affiliation is a restrictive...