Potential bidders respond to a seller’s choice of auction mechanism for a common-value or affiliated-values asset by endogenous decisions whether to incur an information-acquisition cost (and observe a private estimate), or forgo competing. Privately informed participants decide whether to...

Unique-lowest sealed-bid auctions are auctions in which participation is endogenous and the winning bid is the lowest bid among all unique bids. Such auctions admit very many Nash equilibria (NEs) in pure and mixed strategies. The two-bidders' auction is similar to the Hawk-Dove game, which...

Abstract. Query auctions are iterative auctions in which bidders have to select in each round an action from a finite set. We show that, when bidders have continuous valuations, any ex post equilibrium in an ex post individually rational query auction can only be ex post efficient when the...

Two types of auction were introduced on the Internet a few years ago and have rapidly been gaining widespread popularity. In both auctions, players compete for an exogenously determined prize by independently choosing an integer in some finite and common strategy space specified by the...

I study the role of minimum bid increments (MBI) in internet auctions using field experiment data. I sell identical gift cards while varying the MBI. Internet auctions have typically been viewed as second-price, implying truthful bidding. However, due to the presence of the MBI, equilibrium...

This paper studies Colonel Blotto games with two battlefields where one player has a head start in the form of additional troops on one of the battlefields. Such games arise naturally in marketing, electoral competition, and military conflict. Sion and Wolfe (1957) have shown that, if the...

We characterize revenue maximizing auctions when the bidders are intermediaries who wish to resell the good. The bidders have differential information about their common resale opportunities: each bidder privately observes an independent draw of a resale opportunity, and the highest signal is a...

I characterize the optimal accuracy level r of an unbiased Tullock contest between two players with heterogeneous prize valuations. The designer maximizes the winning probability of the strong player or the winner’s expected valuation by choosing a contest with an all-pay auction equilibrium...

The paper studies when efficient allocations are implementable via coalition-proof mechanisms. When ambiguous mechanisms are allowed and agents are maxmin expected utility maximizers, we prove that all efficient allocations are implementable via interim coalition incentive compatible mechanisms...

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...