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...

In contexts in which players have no priors, we analyze a learning process based on ex-post regret as a guide to understand how to play games of incomplete information under private values. The conclusions depend on whether players interact within a fixed set (fixed matching) or they are...

The Babylonian bridal auction, described by Herodotus, is regarded as one of the earliest uses of an auction in history. Yet, to our knowledge, the literature lacks a formal equilibrium analysis of this auction. We provide such an analysis for the twoplayer case with complete and incompete...

The present paper analyzes a general class of first-price all-pay auctions where two players have different "bidding technologies" and one bidder has a head start advantage over his/her opponent. Prize values are common knowledge and may be different between the players. Equilibria are...

We describe a methodology for making counterfactual predictions when the information held by strategic agents is a latent parameter. The analyst observes behavior which is rationalized by a Bayesian model in which agents maximize expected utility, given partial and differential information...

We describe a methodology for making counterfactual predictions when the information held by strategic agents is a latent parameter. The analyst observes behavior which is rationalized by a Bayesian model in which agents maximize expected utility given partial and differential information about...

In this paper, we examine the optimal mechanism design of selling an indivisible object to one regular buyer and one publicly known buyer, where inter-buyer resale cannot be prohibited. The resale market is modeled as a stochastic ultimatum bargaining game between the two buyers. We fully...

How should players bid in keyword auctions such as those used by Google, Yahoo! and MSN? We model ad auctions as a dynamic game of incomplete information, so we can study the convergence and robustness properties of various strategies. In particular, we consider best-response bidding strategies...

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...

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...