We investigate optimal rationing of resources and organizational slack when a principal procures from an agent with private information about fixed and variable costs. We study the problem in a two‐period setting with persistent types and investigate how the optimal rationing and slack depend...

We investigate optimal rationing of resources and organizational slack when a principal procures from an agent with private information about fixed and variable costs. We study the problem in a two-period setting with persistent types and investigate how the optimal rationing and slack depend on...

Internet auctions are an important resource in the business-to-business (B2B) market for companies that want to save money and increase profits. Understanding how auctions work on the Internet is mandatory in today's marketplace. Auctions can be used to do everything from selling excess...

This study addresses the need to account for unobserved heterogeneity in auctions to improve our estimates of the distribution of bidder values. The method uses reserve prices to allow the distribution of bidders' private information to depend on the realization of the unobserved heterogeneity....

This study investigates the design of the royalty rate in a first-price auction across three types of investments: incremental and lumpy with or without an exogenously given intensity. A bidder's investment cost comprises private information. This, together with the stochastic evolution of the...

A budget-constrained buyer wants to purchase items from a shortlisted set. Items are differentiated by quality and sellers have private reserve prices for their items. Sellers quote prices strategically, inducing a knapsack game. The buyer's problem is to select a subset of maximal quality. We...

In uniform price, sealed-bid day-ahead electricity auctions, the market price is set at the intersection between aggregate demand and supply functions built by a market operator. Each day, just one agent - the marginal generator - owns the market-clearing plant. Day-ahead auctions are moreover...

This paper considers procurement auctions with costly bidding when the auctioneer is unable to commit himself to restrict the number of bidders. The auctioneer can, however, offer a financial reward to be paid to every short-listed bidders as an indirect commitment device. Rewards for...

A budget-constrained buyer wants to purchase items from a shortlisted set. Items are differentiated by quality and sellers have private reserve prices for their items. Sellers quote prices strategically, inducing a knapsack game. The buyer's problem is to select a subset of maximal quality. We...

We consider a licensing mechanism for process innovations that combines a license auction with royalty contracts to those who lose the auction. Firms' bids are dual signals of their cost reductions: the winning bid signals the own cost reduction to rival oligopolists, whereas the losing bid...