One most conspicuous and curious phenomenon in online auctions is that a large fraction of goods sold have posted price clauses whereby bidders can buy the goods without taking part in the auctions. Two types of posted price clauses exemplified by Amazon and eBay are found. The paper first...

Poor user experiences with search advertisements can lead to ad avoidance thus reduce search engine’s long-term revenue. We capture the effect of negative user experiences on search engine’s future revenue in a new variable called “shadow costs” and examine the optimal keyword auction...

We consider parametric examples of two-bidder private value auctions in which each bidder observes her own private valuation as well as noisy signals about her opponent's private valuation. In such multidimensional private value auction environments, we show that the revenue equivalence between...

We study efficient auction design for a single indivisible object when bidders have interdependent values and non-quasilinear preferences. Instead of quasilinearity, we assume only that bidders have positive wealth effects. Our setting nests cases where bidders are ex ante asymmetric, face...

It is well-known that the ability of the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism to implement efficient outcomes for private value choice problems does not extend to interdependent value problems. When an agent's type affects other agents' utilities, it may not be incentive compatible for him to...

We propose a simple mechanism, the Continental auction, to allocate a good in a one-to-many bilateral trade problem. This problem is akin to that of a monopolist auctioning a single good, with the special characteristic that both seller and buyer valuations are private. Due to this feature, the...

It is well-known that the ability of the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism to implement efficient outcomes for private value choice problems does not extend to interdependent value problems. When an agent's type affects other agents' utilities, it may not be incentive compatible for him to...

Government mandated technology transfers from the developer of a product to a second source offer a potential gain of reduced information rents and procurement costs. To provide appropriate incentives, technology must sometimes be transferred even when the second source is less efficient than...

I study contests in which each player is ranked by a scoring rule based on both her performance and how close this performance is to a private target, set before the contest. Each player's decision problem is to choose her target when performance is subject to a random component. I analyse the...

It is well-known that the ability of the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism to implement efficient outcomes for private value choice problems does not extend to interdependent value problems. When an agent's type affects other agents' utilities, it may not be incentive compatible for him to...