We investigate firms' incentives for cost reduction in the first price sealed bid auction, a format largely used for procurement. A central feature of the model is that we allow firms to be heterogeneous. Though private value first price auctions are not games with monotonic best responses, we...

We use a simple graphical approach to represent Social Welfare Functions that satisfy Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives and Anonymity. This approach allows us to provide simple and illustrative proofs of May's Theorem, of variants of classic impossibility results, and of a recent result on...

Bidders' asymmetries are widespread in auction markets. Yet, their impact on behavior and, ultimately, revenue and profits is still not well understood. In this paper, I define a natural benchmark auction environment to which to compare any private value auction with asymmetrically distributed...

We use a simple graphical approach to represent Social Welfare Functions that satisfy Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives and Anonymity. This approach allows us to provide simple and illustrative proofs of May's Theorem, of variants of classic impossibility results, and of a recent result on...