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...

This study explores the effects of communication and its interaction with reputation information. Our focus is on buyer-determined procurement auctions with moral hazard in which buyers can select a bidder based on prices and all other information available. The results of our controlled...

We consider a budget-constrained mechanism designer who wants to select an optimal subset of projects to maximize her utility. Project costs are private information and the value the designer derives from their provision may vary. In this allocation problem the choice of projects - both which...

We investigate the claim that auctions in procurement are detrimental to the buyer- seller relationship, which is expressed by less trust by the buyer and more oppor- tunistic behavior by the supplier after the sourcing. To do so, we compare exper- imentally a standard auction and a...

Inspired by recent regulations in the New York ICAP market, this paper examines the effect of price regulations on a multi-unit uniform price auction. General bid caps reduce the maximum price below the bid cap, but also the minimum potential market price below the cap. A bid cap only for the...

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

We derive the optimal incentive compatible and individually rational mechanisms to reallocate arbitrary given ownership shares among a set of agents. These mechanisms are optimal in the sense that they maximize social surplus of the final allocation subject to the aforementioned constraints and...

People overestimate the probability that others share their values or preferences. I introduce type projection equilibrium (TPE) to capture such projection in Bayesian games. TPE allows each player to believe his opponents share his type with intermediate probability \rho. After establishing...

Auctions often involve goods exhibiting a common knowledge ex-post risk. Precautionary bidding predicts that under expected utility, ex-post risk leads DARA bidders to reduce their bids by more than the appropriate risk premium. Because the degree of riskiness of the good, and bidders risk...

We compare two commonly used mechanisms in procurement: auctions and negotiations. The execution of the procurement mechanism is delegated to an agent of the buyer. The agent has private information about the buyer s preferences and may collude with one of the sellers. We provide a precise...