I model access to influence as a two-sided matching market between a continuum of experts and two vertically differentiated gatekeepers under sequential directed search. Real-world examples include academic publishing, venture capital, job search or political agenda setting. The equilibrium is...

We consider a model of oligopolistic firms that have private information about their cost structure. Prior to competing in the market a competitive advantage, i.e., a cost reducing technology, is allocated to a subset of the firms by means of a multi-object auction. After the auction either all...

We study contests in which contestants are homogeneous and have convex effort costs. Increasing contest competitiveness, by making prizes more unequal, scaling up the competition, or adding new contestants, always discourages effort. These results have significant implications: although often...

Two players with independent private values compete for a prize in an all-pay contest. Before the contest, each player can spy on the opponent by privately acquiring a costly, noisy, and private signal about his private value. In a symmetric equilibrium of the contest where players spy on each...

We study when equilibrium prices can aggregate information in an auction market with a large population of traders. Our main result identifies a property of information—the betweenness property that is both necessary and sufficient for information aggregation. The characterization provides...

We consider a model of oligopolistic firms that have private information about their cost structure. Prior to competing in the market a competitive advantage, i.e., a cost reducing technology, is allocated to a subset of the firms by means of a multi-object auction. After the auction either all...

Suppliers often make proactive investments in capacity to strategically position themselves to win a contract with a monopolist buyer. Such investments reduce the suppliers' variable costs of serving the buyer's demand. We show that an auction mechanism does not always benefit the...

We consider imperfectly discriminating, common-value, all-pay auctions (or contests) where some players know the value of the prize, others do not. We show that if the prize is always of positive value, then all players are active in equilibrium. If the prize is of value zero with positive...

We investigate if and how revenue-maximizing auctioneers restrict combinatorial bidding in the presence of auctioneer competition. Two sellers offer the same set of two heterogeneous items to six bidders in a VCG mechanism. Each bidder desires either the first item, the second item, or the...

In enterprise software markets, firms are increasingly using services-based business models built on open-source software (OSS) to compete with established, proprietary software firms. Because thirdparty firms can also strategically contribute to OSS and compete in the services market, the...