In this paper, we empirically assess the effects of the winner's curse in auctions for toll road concession contracts. Such auctions are common-value auctions for incomplete contracts prone to pervasive renegotiations. We address three questions in turn. First, we investigate the overall effects...

During the recent sales of UMTS licenses in Europe some countries used auctions while others resorted to so-called Beauty Contests. There seems to be a wide consensus among economists that in these and other contexts like privatisation an auction is the better selling mechanism. However, why...

During the recent sales of UMTS licenses in Europe some countries used auctions while others resorted to so-called Beauty Contests. There seems to be a wide consensus among economists that in these and other contexts like privatisation an auction is the better selling mechanism. However, why...

We examine the impact of the EU Remedies Directive on the use of direct awards. Theoretically, strengthening bid protest mechanisms should reduce the use of direct awards as aggrieved bidders are more likely to challenge such awards. By utilising the staggered implementation of the Remedies...

Using data from an original survey of practicing auctioneers, this paper examines the effect of binding time constraints on the auctioneer’s selling strategy in an outcry auction. We present a time-allocation model in which the length of time allocated to the sale of an item must be traded off...

Treating markets as arenas where relative advantage is contested, this entry explores the emergence and evolution of Western markets for paintings, 1450–1750, in terms of the players, their creative moves to secure gain, and the rules they devised to maintain order. Primary markets for...

This paper investigates the empirical importance of allowing for multi-dimensional sources of unobserved heterogeneity in auction models with private information. It in turn develops the estimation procedure that recovers the distribution of private information in the presence of two distinct...

This paper proposes a semi-parametric method to uncover the distribution of bidders' private information in the market for highway procurement when unobserved auction heterogeneity is present. I derive sufficient conditions under which the model is identified and show that the estimation...

Unanimous voting as the fundamental procedural source of political legitimacy grants veto power to each individual. We present an axiomatic characterization of a class of bidding processes to spell out the underlying egalitarian values for collective projects of a productive state. At heart of...