Using data from a large-scale sales campaign on eBay, I show that successful auction customers punish the seller through unfavorable public feedback when they later learn discover a cheaper fixed-price offer. The probability of receiving such feedback is four times bigger for auctions than for...

The outcome of non-binding reverse auctions critically depends on how information is distributed during the bidding process. We use data from a large European procurement platform to study the impact of different information structures, specifically the availability of quality information to the...

We examine welfare effects of real-time pricing in electricity markets. Before stochastic energy demand is known, competitive retailers contract with final consumers who exogenously do not have real-time meters. After demand is realized, two electricity generators compete in a uniform price...

We study a model of war in which the outcome of the war is uncertain from the perspective of the involved countries not because of luck on the battlefield (as in standard models) but because of their lack of information about their opponents. In our model there are two countries characterized by...

Efficiency and sustainability often clash if limited-tenure use rights for renewable natural resources are rented to private resource managers. We introduce a mechanism reconciling these two issues for a stochastically developing natural resource. The mechanism selects the most patient and,...

This article investigates the impact of societal structure on behavior in competitions that can be modeled as all-pay auctions with identity-dependent externalities. The consideration of identity-dependent externalities, which naturally arise in the most common applications of all-pay auctions,...

We recommend that an auction market replace the current system for submitting academic papers and show a strict Pareto-improvement of equilibrium. Besides the benefits of speed, this mechanmism increases the average quality of articles and journals and rewards editors and referees for their...

In a sequential auction of perfect substitutes, we analyze the consequences of the seller's incapacity to commit perfectly to a reserve-price schedule. When facing such a seller, the bidders have strong incentives not to reveal during the earlier rounds of the auction any information about their...

We analyze the infuence of the number of competitors, the costs of doping and the distribution of talents on the doping behavior. In an n-player strategic game modelled as an all-pay auction, the players have private information about their talent and the amount of doping. The main finding of...

This paper studies optimal auction design when the seller can affect the buyers' valuations through an unobservable ex ante investment. The key insight is that the optimal mechanism may have the seller play a mixed investment strategy so as to create correlation between the otherwise...