This paper studies a contest in which players with unobservable types may form an alliance in a pre-stage of the game to join their forces and compete for a prize. We characterize the pure strategy equilibria of this game of incomplete information. We show that if the formation of an alliance is...

Anchoring is a robust behavioral phenomenon modeled predominantly as a bias in individual judgment. We propose a game-theoretic model that considers players’ beliefs about others’ behavior as a mediator for the effect of the anchor on a player’s choice. The results establish that anchoring...

I investigate the decision problem of a player in a game of incomplete information who faces uncertainty about the other players' strategies. I propose a new decision criterion which works in two steps. First, I assume common knowledge of rationality and eliminate all strategies which are not...

Anchoring is one of the most studied and robust behavioral biases, but there is little knowledge about its persistence in strategic settings. This article studies the role of anchoring bias in private-value auctions. We test experimentally two different anchor types. The announcement of a random...

This paper analyzes the signaling effect of bidding in a two-round elimination contest. Before the final round, bids in the preliminary round are revealed and act as signals of the contestants' private valuations. Depending on his valuation, a contestant may have an incentive to bluff or sandbag...

Considered are imperfectly discriminating contests in which players may possess private information about the primitives of the game, such as the contest technology, valuations of the prize, cost functions, and budget constraints. We find general conditions under which a given contest of...

Szidarovszky and Okuguchi (Games and Economic Behavior, 1997) have provided useful conditions for the existence of a unique pure-strategy Nash equilibrium in rent-seeking games of complete information. In this paper, we generalize their results to contests with incomplete informa tion. Two...

In this paper, we investigate behavior in two-player sequential-move contests with complete and incomplete information about the value of the prize, theoretically and experimentally. First, we describe a Bayesian equilibrium of a sequential contest in which both players have private prize...

In this paper we present a new iterative acution, the bisection auction, that can be used for the sale of a single indivisible object. We will show that the bisection auction is computationally more efficient than the classical English auction while it still preserves all characteristics the...

In unrestricted combinatorial auctions, we put forward a mechanism that guarantees a meaningful revenue benchmark based on the possibilistic beliefs that the players have about each other’s valuations. In essence, the mechanism guarantees, within a factor of two, the maximum revenue that the...