We introduce a new method of varying the risk that bidders face in first-price private value auctions. We find that decreasing bidders' risk significantly reduces the degree of overbidding relative to the risk-neutral Bayesian-Nash equilibrium prediction. This implies that risk affects bidding...

This paper characterizes the optimal first-price auction (FPA) and second-price auction (SPA) for selling rights, contracts, or licenses that involve ensuing payoff uncertainty for the winning bidder. The distribution of the random payoff is common knowledge, except that bidders have private...

We investigate the possibility of enhancing efficiency by awarding premiums to a set of highest bidders in an English auction - in a setting that extends Maskin and Riley (1984, Econometrica 52: 1473-1518) in three aspects: (i) the seller can be risk averse, (ii) the bidders can have...

A fundamental result of contest theory is that evenly matched contests are fought most intensely, implying that a contest designer maximizes effort from each contestant by artificially boosting the chances of the underdog. Such "handicapping" is credited with making sports contests more...

In a security-bid auction, the stochastic revenue of the project being auctioned is used as an asset to securitize the winner's payment to the seller. De Marzo et al. (2005) show that in an environment with risk-neutral seller and bidders, steeper securities increase the seller's expected...

The answer is no. Although naive intuition may suggest the opposite, uncertainty about costs in the homogeneous-good Bertrand model intensifies competition: it lowers price and raises total surplus (but also makes profits go up). For some economic environments, this is implied by Hansen's (RAND,...

As business-to-business commerce shifts to the Internet, newer suppliers with cheaper but unreliable technologies enter the market place to win orders from firms by beating the price of their perfectly reliable (but expensive) competitors. The dilemma facing purchasing firms is the allocation of...

A perfectly divisible corporate bond is allocated to a set of bidders characterized by limits both to their budget, but most importantly to the risk entailed in their portfolio. Bidders possess symmetric information concerning the secondary market's yield. We choose to use a uniform pricing...

This paper proposes an approach to proving nonparametric identification for distributions of bidders’ values in asymmetric second-price auctions. I consider the case when bidders have independent private values and the only available data pertain to the winner’s identity and the transaction...

We justify risk neutral equilibrium bidding in commonly known fair division games with incompleteinformation by an evolutionary setup postulating (i) minimal common knowledge, (ii) optimal responses to conjectural beliefs how others behave and (iii) evolutionary selection of conjectural beliefs...