To study whether consumers will pay more for products that generate charitable donations, we analyze data from eBay on charity and noncharity auctions of otherwise identical products. Charity prices are 6 percent higher, on average, than noncharity prices. Bids below the closing price are also...

This paper presents a game theoretic analysis of the generalized second-price auction that the company Overture operated in 2004 to sell sponsored search listings on search engines. We construct a model that embodies few prior assumptions about parameters, and we present results that indicate...

Die Anteile fluktuierender erneuerbarer Stromerzeugung aus Windkraft- und Photovoltaikanlagen steigen in Deutschland und Europa. Ein effizienterer Handel dieser erneuerbarer Energien erfordert flexible Strommärkte. Hierbei können Auktionen einen effizienteren Handel ermöglichen, unter anderem...

This paper develops a methodology for characterizing expected revenue from auctions when bidders' types come from an arbitrary distribution. In particular, types may be multidimensional, and there may be mass points in the distribution. One application extends existing revenue equivalence...

We prove by construction that ex post incentive compatible mechanisms exist in a private goods setting with multi-dimensional signals and interdependent values. The mechanism shares features with the generalized Vickrey auction of one-dimensional signal models. The construction implies that for...

A crucial assumption in the optimal auction literature is that each bidder's valuation is known to be drawn from a unique distribution. In this paper we study the optimal auction problem allowing for ambiguity about the distribution of valuations. Agents may be ambiguity averse (modeled using...

We give a sufficient condition on the type space for revenue equivalence when the set of social alternatives consists of probability distributions over a finite set. Types are identified with real-valued functions that assign valuations to elements of this finite set, and the type space is...

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...

The literature on competing auctions offers a model where sellers compete for buyers by setting reserve prices freely. An important outstanding conjecture (e.g. Peters and Severinov (1997)) is that the sellers post prices close to their marginal costs when the market becomes large. This...

We consider Bayesian incentive-compatible mechanisms with independent types and either private values or interdependent values that satisfy a form of "congruence." We show that in these settings, interim participation constraints are satisfied when the status quo is the randomized allocation...