We study auction design when parties cannot commit themselves to the mechanism. The seller may change the rules of the game and the buyers choose their outside option at all stages. We assume that the seller has a leading role in equilibrium selection at any stage of the game. Stationary...

This paper analyzes the signaling effect of bidding in a two-round elimination contest. Before the final round, bids in the preliminary round are revealed and act as signals of the contestants' private valuations. Depending on his valuation, a contestant may have an incentive to bluff or sandbag...

We study an in.nitely-repeated .rst-price auction with common values. Initially, bid-ders receive independent private signals about the objects. value, which itself does not change over time. Learning occurs only through observation of the bids. Under one-sided incomplete information, this...

We study all-pay auctions (or wars of attrition), where the highest bidder wins an object, but all bidders pay their bids. We consider such auctions when two bidders alternate in raising their bids and where all aspects of the auction are common knowledge including bidders' valuations. We...

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 consider the problem of fairly allocating one indivisible object when monetary transfers are possible, and examine the existence of Bayesian incentive compatible mechanisms to solve the problem. We propose a mechanism that satisfies envy-freeness, budget balancedness, and Bayesian incentive...

In an experiment using two-bidder first-price sealed bid auctions with symmetric independent private values, we collected information on the female participants' menstrual cycles. We find that women bid significantly higher than men in their menstrual and premenstrual phase but do not bid...

Previous research indicates that risky and uncertain marginal returns from the public good significantly lower contributions. This paper presents experimental results illustrating that the effects of risk and uncertainty depend on the employed parameterization. Specifically, if the value of the...

We use laboratory experiments to compare allocation rules in uniform price divisible good auctions. 'Standard' and 'uniform' allocation rules admit different types of low-price equilibria, which are eliminated by a 'hybrid' rule. We observe little evidence of revenue differences among the...

In contexts in which players have no priors, we analyze a learning process based on ex-post regret as a guide to understand how to play games of incomplete information under private values. The conclusions depend on whether players interact within a fixed set (fixed matching) or they are...