This is a preliminary draft of an Invited Symposium paper for the World Congress of the Econometric Society to be held in Seattle in August 2000. We discuss the strong connections between auction theory and standard economic theory, and argue that auction-theoretic tools and intuitions can...

Aggregate art price patterns mask a lot of underlying variation — both in the time series and in the cross-section. The authors argue that, to increase our understanding of the market for aesthetics, it is helpful to take a micro perspective on the formation of art prices, and acknowledge that...

Raising the public administration's efficiency is, without any doubt, one of the greatest challenges nowadays in Brazil. The State's technical and allocative efficiency dimensions necessarily require efficiency of public agencies in the acquisition of inputs for their production and supply...

The procurement of complex projects is often plagued by large cost overruns. One important reason for these additional costs are flaws in the initial design. If the project is procured with a price-only auction, sellers who spotted some of the flaws have no incentive to reveal them early. Each...

Problem Definition: We consider a buyer that needs to source a fixed quantity. She faces several potential suppliers that might fail to deliver. The buyer conducts a procurement auction to determine contract suppliers and can choose between single-sourcing and multi-sourcing. If contract...

Public spending (i.e., 'G') enables governments to fulfill their fiscal policies. This paper takes a micro perspective and quantifies the impact of procurement spending - a specific component of G - on firm survival. We find that firms that receive public contracts survive longer, ceteris...

We investigate the impact of public procurement spending on business survival. Using Italy as a laboratory, we construct a large-scale dataset on firms–covering balance-sheet, income-statement, and administrative records–and match it with public contract data. Employing a regression...

We study the potential benefits of adding a lottery component to cut the main risks associated with standard negotiated and rule-based auction procurement procedures. We show that adopting a two stage approach in which bureaucrats first negotiate with a small number of bidders to assess their...

This paper solves the equilibrium bid functions of third- and higher-price auctions for a large class of distribution functions of bidders' valuations, assuming the symmetric independent private values framework, and risk neutrality. In all these auctions, equilibrium bids exceed bidders'...

Dieser Diskussionsbeitrag kommentiert Güths axiomatische Begründung der Zweit-Preis-Auktion. In diesem Zusammenhang wird auch Güths umfangreiche Analyse der Lambda-Auktion durch eine einfache und anschaulich interpretierbare Lösung ersetzt.