We analyze strategic leaks due to spying out a rival’s bid in a first-price auction. Such leaks induce sequential bidding, complicated by the fact that the spy may be a counterspy who serves the interests of the spied at bidder and reports strategically distorted information. This ambiguity...

RAND commitments i.e., promises to license on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms play a key role in standard setting processes. However, the usefulness of those commitments has recently been questioned. The problem allegedly lies in the absence of a generally agreed test to determine...

We analyze strategic leaks due to spying out a rival’s bid in a first-price auction. Such leaks induce sequential bidding, complicated by the fact that the spy may be a counterspy who serves the interests of the spied at bidder and reports strategically distorted information. This ambiguity...

We analyze Stackelberg leadership in a first-price auction. Leadership is induced by an information system, represented by a spy, that leaks one bidder's bid before others choose their bids. However, the leader may secretly revise his bid with some probability; therefore, the leaked bid is only...

When the winner of one auction gains a cost advantage in the next, bids reflect not only the value of winning the auction, but also the value of gaining an incumbent advantage in future auctions. If a larger firm's advantage derives from a cost or product advantage, it has a greater chance of...

One of the fundamental results of auction theory is the Linkage Principle, which states that the seller's expected revenue is enhanced by ex ante full public disclosure of information about the value of the good. Previous literature has established that the Principle fails in dynamic settings....

We study cheap-talk pre-play communication in the static all-pay auctions. For the case of two bidders, all correlated and communication equilibria are payoff equivalent to the Nash equilibrium if there is no reserve price, or if it is commonly known that one bidder has a strictly higher value....

We study the implications of delegating bids to a bidding agency for the revenues and efficiency of the Generalized Second-Price auction, the standard sales mechanism for allocating online ad space. The agency maximizes both its own profits and the advertisers' surplus and implements collusive...

Auctioneers suspecting bidder collusion often lack the formal evidence needed for legal recourse. A practical alternative is to design auctions that hinder collusion. Since Abreu et al. (1986), economic theory has emphasized imperfect monitoring as a constraint on collusion, but evidence remains...

We model uniform and discriminatory auctions in wholesale electricity markets. High variability of electricity prices is often explained by exogenous economic factors. We, however, show that it can result endogenously from suppliers' strategic bidding, and that the connection between demand and...