This paper studies sequential auctions of licences to participate in a symmetric market game. Assuming that the rate at which industry profits decrease with repeated entry is not too large, at the unique solution either a single firm preempts entry altogether or entry occurs in every stage,...

We show that, under independent private values, no mechanism that contains a right-of-first-refusal clause can maximize the sum of the utilities of the seller and the right-holder.

We examine a simple model of collusion under a single-object secondprice auction. Under the appropriate parameter conditions, in particular as long as collusion is neither too easy, nor too difficult, we find that the optimal policy involves both an effective ceiling, as well as a reserve price...

There are a number of examples in the auction literature (Perry and Reny, 1999, and Krishna, 2002) where releasing the seller's private information can lead to a lowering of expected revenue. On the other hand, releasing information always increases welfare. Levin and Smith (1994) point out that...

This paper, forthcoming in Journal of Economic Surveys, provides an elementary, non-technical, survey of auction theory, by introducing and describing some of the critical papers in the subject. (The most important of these are reproduced in a companion book, The Economic Theory of Auctions,...

We show that, under independent private values, no mechanism that contains a right-of-first-refusal clause can maximize the sum of the utilities of the seller and the right-holder.

There are a number of examples in the auction literature (Perry and Reny, 1999, and Krishna, 2002) where releasing the seller's private information can lead to a lowering of expected revenue. On the other hand, releasing information always increases welfare. Levin and Smith (1994) point out that...

We examine and compare the (normally, mixed) symmetric equilibrium bidding strategies in first-price and all-pay common value multiple item auctions with a random number of bidders, who only seek one of the identical items and have the same budget.

Researchers have found that an individual’s risk attitude is not stable across elicitation methods. Results reported by Deck et al. (2009) suggest that personality may help explain the apparent inconsistency, offering support to Borghans et al.’s (2008) argument that economists should...

This paper provides an economic framework within which to consider the effectiveness and limitations of auction markets. The paper looks at the use of auctions as a policy instrument and the effects of auction design on consumer interests, the efficient allocation of resources, and industry...