How do informational asymmetries between bidders affect the outcome of common value auctions? Should the seller accept bids from bidders with more precise information? If so, under what conditions? What effect do such asymmetries have on the seller’s expected revenue? We analyze these...

Using data from the transparent Indian IPO setting, the paper examines retail investors’ participation, their influence on IPO pricing and the returns they make on IPO investment. The transparency in the mechanism, which allows investors to observe prior investors’ participation, leads to...

This paper reviews single object auctions when bidders’ values of the object are interdependent. We will see how the auction forms could be ranked in terms of expected revenue when signals that bidders have about the value of the object are affiliated. In the discussion that follows we will...

This paper explains how and why the Matching Auctions work better with Imperfect Financial Markets. We show that an efficient outsider can obtain a “good” project even if the insider has informational advantage.

We investigate the relevance of conditional reasoning and belief formation for the occurrence of the winner’s curse with the help of two experimental manipulations. First, we compare results from a very simple common-value auction game with results from a transformed version of this game that...

This paper employs individual bidding data to analyze the empirical performance of the longer term re?nancing operations (LTROs) of the European Central Bank (ECB). We investigate how banks’ bidding behavior is related to a series of exogenous variables such as collateral costs, interest rate...

We develop tests for common values at first-price sealed-bid auctions. Our tests are nonparametric, require observation only of the bids submitted at each auction, and are based on the fact that the “winner’s curse” arises only in common values auctions. The tests build on recently...

This paper explores the use of auctions for privatizing public assets.In our model, a single "insider" bidder (e.g. incumbent management of a government-owned firm) possesses information about the asset's risky value.In addition, bidders are privately informed about their costs of exploiting the...

It is still an open question when groups perform better than individuals in intellectual tasks. We report that in a company takeover experiment, groups placed better bids than individuals and substantially reduced the winner’s curse. This improvement was mostly due to peer pressure over the...