Consider a contest for a prize in which each player knows his/her own ability, but may or may not know those of his/her rivals (the complete or incomplete information regimes). Our main result is that, if the value of the prize is high, more effort and output are engendered under incomplete...

In almost common value auctions, even a very small private payoff advantage is usually supposed to have an explosive effect on the outcomes in a second- price sealed-bid auction. According to Bikhchandani (1988) and Klemperer (1997) the large set of equilibria obtained for common value auction...

We show that Nash equilibrium components are universal for the collection of connected polyhedral sets. More precisely for every polyhedral set we construct a so-called binary game—a game where all players have two pure strategies and a common utility function with values either zero or...

We show that Nash equilibrium components are universal for the collection of connected polyhedral sets. More precisely for every polyhedral set we construct a so-called binary game — a common interest game whose common payoff to the players is at most equal to one—whose success set (the set...

Consider agents who undertake costly effort to produce stochastic outputs observable by a principal. The principal can award a prize deterministically to the agent with the highest output, or to all of them with probabilities that are proportional to their outputs. We show that, if there is...

We analyse how the market design influences the bidding behaviour in multi-unit auctions, such as wholesale electricity markets. It is shown that competition improves for increased market transparency and we identify circumstances where the auctioneer prefers uniform to discriminatory pricing....

A simultaneous pooled auction with multiple bids and preference lists is a way to auction multiple objects, in which bidders simultaneously express a bid for each object and a preference ordering over which object they would like to get in case they have the highest bid on more than one object....

We characterize revenue maximizing mechanisms in a common value environment where the value of the object is equal to the highest of bidders' independent signals. The optimal mechanism exhibits either neutral selection, wherein the object is randomly allocated at a price that all bidders are...

We consider a procurement auction, where each supplier has private costs and submits a stepped supply function. We solve for a Bayesian Nash equilibrium and show that the equilibrium has a price instability in the sense that a minor change in a supplier.s cost sometimes result in a major change...

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...