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...

We compare auctioning and grandfathering as allocation mechanisms of emission permits when there is a secondary market with market power and the firms have private information. Based on real-life cases such as the EU ETS, we consider a multi-unit, multi-bid uniform auction, modelled as a...

We study the design of all-pay contests when the organizer's objective is to maximize the expected winner's effort and contestants have private information about their valuations for the prize. We identify sufficient conditions for every optimal contest to involve differential treatment of ex...

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...

We analyze strategic leaks due to spying out a rival’s bid in a first-price auction. Such leaks induce sequential bidding, complicated by the fact that the spy may be a counterspy who serves the interests of the spied at bidder and reports strategically distorted information. This ambiguity...

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...

Vickrey advocates charging the winner of an auction only the second highest price. This paper proves that he has betrayed his own theory to come to such a wrong conclusion. This paper also points out the harmful consequences inflicted by his wrong auction method, and accuses him of destroying...

This paper illustrates the intricacies associated with the design of revenue-maximizing mechanisms for a monopolist who expects her buyers to resell in a secondary market. We consider two modes of resale: the first is to a third party who does not participate in the primary market; the second is...

This paper examines the intricacies associated with the design of revenue-maximizing mechanisms for a monopolist who expects her buyers to resell. We consider two cases: resale to a third party who does not participate in the primary market and inter-bidder resale, where the winner resells to...