An online platform makes a profit by auctioning an advertising slot that appears whenever a consumer visits its website.  Several firms compete in the auction, and consumers differ in their preferences.  Prior to the auction, the platform gathers data which is statistically correlated with...

In many auction settings, there is favoritism: the seller's welfare depends positively on the utility of a subset of potential bidders. However, laws or regulations may not allow the seller to discriminate among bidders. We find the optimal nondiscriminatory auction in a private value,...

Under a specific informational framework, we compare the seller's expected revenue from a first-price auction and a second-price auction when bidders are risk averse and have private affiliated values.

This is a commentary on Vernon Smith's contributions to experimental economics