Motivated by challenges facing IT procurement, this paper studies a hybrid procurement model where a reverse auction of a fixed-price IT outsourcing contract may be followed by renegotiation to extend the contract's scope. In this model, the buyer balances the need to incentivize...

Some of the most beautiful results in mechanism design depend crucially on Myerson's (1981) regularity condition. E.g., the second-price auction with reserve price is revenue maximizing only if the type distribution is regular. This paper offers two main results. First, an interpretation of...

Blockchain implementations of auctions have to deal with the problem of front-running: block production happens at discrete intervals, and anyone can inspect and react to the incoming bids before they are written on chain. The presence of smart contracts among bidders, a hallmark of automated...

For a repeated procurement problem, we compare two stylized negotiating cultures which differ in how the buyer uses an entrant to exert pressure on the incumbent resembling U.S. style and Japanese style procurement. In each period, the suppliers are privately informed about their production...

We consider multi-stage elimination contests, where agents efforts at different stages generate some output for the organizers. Depending on the output function we characterize the optimal prize structure of the tournament and show that it is almost efficient. We have found that in some cases...

In this note, we experimentally examine the relative performance of price-only auctions and multi-attribute auctions. We do so in procurement settings where the buyer can give the winning bidder incentives to exert effort on non-price dimensions after the auction. Both auctions theoretically...

This paper studies markets plagued with asymmetric information on the quality of traded goods. In Akerlof's setting, sellers are better informed than buyers. In contrast, we examine cases where buyers are better informed than sellers. This creates an inverse adverse selection problem: The market...

This paper analyzes an all-pay auction where the winner is determined according to the sum of the bid and a handicap endowed to all players. The bidding strategy in equilibrium is then explicitly derived as a 'piecewise affine transformation' of the equilibrium strategy in an all-pay auction...

This paper analyzes an all-pay auction where the winner is determined according to the sum of the bid and a handicap endowed to all players. The bidding strategy in equilibrium is then explicitly derived as a “piecewise affine transformation” of the equilibrium strategy in an all-pay auction...

This paper studies markets plagued with asymmetric information on the quality of traded goods. In Akerlof's setting, sellers are better informed than buyers. In contrast, we examine cases where buyers are better informed than sellers. This creates an inverse adverse selection problem: The market...