Several papers compare auctioning heterogeneous assets sequentially with sequentially selling the right to choose among assets not yet taken. Typically motivated by auctions of condos for owner occupation, these papers have assumed that each winning bidder exits, so each successive auction has...

The adverse-selection literature has only considered the case in which competing sellers' costs of supply are independent and privately known by the individual sellers. In contrast, the auction literature has ignored adverse selection by implicitly assuming that a bid-taker is indifferent...

Milgrom and Weber's General Symmetric Model of auctions is adapted to an extensive form in which seller first announces rules for an auction, then each of a pool of potential bidders makes a rational choice whether to participate, i.e., to acquire some initial information at an opportunity cost....

Experimental methods are currently being used extensively to elicit subjective values for commodities and projects. Three methodological problems are not addressed in this emerging literature. The first is the potential for laboratory responses to be censored by field opportunities; the second...

We attempt a more realistic abstraction of an English (oral ascending) auction than the standard, in Milgrom and Weber [1982]. In particular, the assumptions that exists are irrevocable and necessarily public are dropped. In the model, the price rises in a stylization of an auctioneer...

Truthful revelation is a dominant strategy in both second-price and English (oral ascending bid) private-values auctions. Controlled observations of English auctions are largely consistent with the dominant strategy prediction, but laboratory second-price auctions exhibit substantial and...

Consider an estimate of the common value of an auctioned asset that is symmetric in the bidders' types. Such an estimate can be represented solely in terms of the order statistics of those types. This representation forms the basis for a pricing rule yielding truthful bidding as an equilibrium,...