We consider situations where a society tries to efficiently allocate several homogeneous and indivisible goods among agents. Each agent receives at most one unit of the good. For example, suppose that a government wishes to allocate a fixed number of licenses to operate in its country to private...

In an incomplete information setting, we analyze the sealed bid auction proposed by Knaster (cf. Steinhaus (1948)). This procedure was designed to efficiently and fairly allocate multiple indivisible items when participants report their valuations truthfully. In equilibrium, players do not...

In many markets, sellers advertise their good with an asking price. This is a price at which the seller is willing to take his good off the market and trade immediately, though it is understood that a buyer can submit an offer below the asking price and that this offer may be accepted if the...

In many markets, sellers advertise their good with an asking price. This is a price at which the seller will take his good off the market and trade immediately, though it is understood that a buyer can submit an offer below the asking price and that this offer may be accepted if the seller...

In this paper we analyze sequencing situations under incomplete information where agents have interdependent costs. We first argue why Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (or VCG) mechanism fails to implement a simple sequencing problem in dominant strategies. Given this impossibility, we try to implement...

In mechanism design problems under incomplete information, it is generally difficult to find decision problems that are first best implementable. A decision problem under incomplete information is first best implementable if there exists a mechanism that extracts the private information and...

The purpose of this paper is to compare the two auction techniques (discriminatory and uniform-price auctions) most commonly used for the sale of securities. Literature tends to analyze methods from the aspect of the expected revenue from the auction. Theoretical models arrive at different...

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 consider situations where a society tries to efficiently allocate several homogeneous and indivisible goods among agents. Each agent receives at most one unit of the good. For example, suppose that a government wishes to allocate a fixed number of licenses to operate in its country to private...

In many auctions, matching between the bidder and seller raises the value of the contract for both parties. However, information about the quality of the match may be incomplete. We consider the case in which each bidder observes the quality of his match with the seller but the seller does not...