We use an experiment to study whether market competition can reduce anomalous behaviour in games. In different treatments, we employ two alternative mechanisms, the random mechanism and the auction mechanism, to allocate the participation rights to the red hat puzzle game, a well-known logical...

In this note I show that the equilibrium in cutoff strategies observed in auctions with a buy-it-now price may also arise in markets where objects are sold simultaneously by auctions and posted prices. However, contrary to auctions with a buy-it-now price where buyers need to know only the total...

We use an experiment to study whether market competition can reduce anomalous behaviour in games. In different treatments, we employ two alternative mechanisms, the random mechanism and the auction mechanism, to allocate the participation rights to the red hat puzzle game, a well-known logical...

In this note I show that the equilibrium in cutoff strategies observed in auctions with a buy-it-now price may also arise in markets where objects are sold simultaneously by auctions and posted prices. However, contrary to auctions with a buy-it-now price where buyers need to know only the total...

We conduct an experiment to test whether probability misperception may be a possible alternative to risk aversion to explain overbidding in independent first-price private-values auctions. The experimental outcomes indicate that subjects underestimate their probability of winning the auction,...

In this paper, we study bidding behavior by firms in beauty-contest auctions, i.e. auctions in which the winning bid is the one which gets closest to some function (average) of all submitted bids. Using a dataset on public procurement beauty-contest auctions in Italy and exploiting a change in...

There is a debate about whether risk aversion is the main source of overbidding in a first-price independent private values auction. As an alternative, we adopt a non-expected utility framework, and identify an interpretable property on the probability weighting function which always induces...

Auctions are the allocation-mechanisms of choice whenever goods and information in markets are scarce. Therefore, understanding how information affects welfare and revenues in these markets is of fundamental interest. We introduce new statistical concepts, k- and k-m-dispersion, for...

In mechanism design, Myerson regularity is often too weak for a quantitative analysis of performance. For instance, ratios between revenue and welfare, or sales probabilities may vanish at the boundary of Myerson regularity. This paper therefore explores the quantitative version of Myerson...

We study a problem of optimal auction design in the realistic case in which the players can collude both on the way they play in the auction and on their participation decisions. Despite the fact that the principal's opportunities for extracting payments from the agents in such a situation are...