We study procurement auctions in which, as is common in practice, a group of sellers (incumbents, qualified bidders) is given an advantage, based, for example, on better reliability, quality, or incumbency status. We show conditions under which for any given first price handicap auction, there...

We provide a new class of counter-examples to existence in a simple moral hazard problem in which the first-order approach is valid. In contrast to the Mirrlees example, unbounded likelihood ratios on the signal technology are not central. Rather, our examples center around the behavior of the...

We define and explore no‐upward‐crossing (NUC), a condition satisfied by every parameterized family of distributions commonly used in economic applications. Under smoothness assumptions, NUC is equivalent to log‐supermodularity of the negative of the derivative of the distribution with...