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...

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...

We devise a tractable model to study the buyer's bid double auction (BBDA) that allows correlated signals and interdependent values/costs. We demonstrate that simple, easily calculated equilibria exist in small markets. We prove that the incentive for strategic behavior vanishes at a O (1/η)...

We study the design of profit-maximizing mechanisms in environments with interdependent values. A single unit of a good is for sale. There is a known joint distribution of the bidders' ex post values for the good. Two programs are considered:(i) Maximize over mechanisms the minimum over...

Suppose a firm uses inputs that are substitutes. Each input is supplied by a single contractor. The firm would like to make suppliers compete. However, since inputs are imperfect substitutes, resorting to winner-take-all competition may not be an attractive option. We allow the firm to use a...

In this paper, we seek to determine if auctions can be used to select players according to their level-k types. To do so, we embed auctions into the p- beauty contest game. We find that by using different designs, we can get the auction winners to be either the lower level-k types or the higher...

In the standard auction model, we provide a necessary and sufficient condition on the value domain under which non-trivial mechanisms exist that satisfy group strategy-proofness and symmetry. In particular, this condition is satisfied (violated) if values are drawn from a finite set (an interval)

This paper investigates whether a contest organizer should disclose private information about bidders' abilities in an all-pay auction. Bidders' abilities are affiliated through an underlying state of the world and are accessible by the contest organizer. The organizer decides whether to...

We present an empirical investigation of the role of marketing agencies in Google's online ad auctions. By combining data on advertisers' affiliation to marketing agencies with data on bidding in ad auctions, we analyze how changes in the concentration of clients in the same industry under the...

In first- and second-price private value auctions with sequential bidding, second movers may discover the first movers' bid. Equilibrium behavior in the first-price auction is mostly unaffected but there are multiple equilibria in the second-price auction. Consequently, comparative statics...