Applying auction theory to the toxic-asset rescue plan currently released by the United States Treasury Department, this paper demonstrates an equilibrium where moderately poor bidders outbid rich bidders in such auctions. After defeating their rich rivals and acquiring the toxic assets, such...

The core is reformulated to incorporate the externality typical in strategic form games.  Any coalition of players may deviate by trying to commit to a profile of actions different from a status quo.  The outsiders of the coalition may take a coordinated measure, incentive-feasibly for...

 A social planner wishes to launch a project but the contenders capable of running the project are cash-constrained and may default.  To signal their capabilities, the contenders may finance their bids through debt or equity, depending on the mechanism chosen by the social planner.  When...

In production economies, the extent to which non-equilibria are blocked depends on specific rules that allocate authority among shareholders, because a blocking coalition's resources are affected by the firms it jointly owns with outsiders. Based on a notion of stochastic blocking, we extend...

We characterize optimal selling mechanisms in auction environments where bidders must incur a cost to learn their valuations. These mechanisms specify for each period, as a function of the bids in previous periods, which new potential buyers should be asked to bid. In addition, these mechanisms...

We study optimal auctions when contacting prospective bidders is costly and the biddersï¾’ values are correlated. Although full surplus extraction is in general impossible, we can construct a search mechanism that fully extracts the surplus with an arbitrarily high probability.

Competitive behaviors such as outbidding one's rivals may be countered by the rivals' threat of mutually destructive objections. In an Arrow-Debreu model of production economies with firms privatized by property rights, we model such hindered competitive behaviors as a coalition's attempt to...

This paper analyzes auctions where budget-constrained bidders have options to declare bankruptcy. It predicts a bidding equilibrium that changes is continuously in a borrowing rate available to bidders. When the borrowing rate is above a threshold, high-budget bidders win, and the likelihood of...

As competition is introduced across the electric power industry around the world, market design for the industry is urgently needed to shape its future structure and performance. When generator companies compete with one another in a deregulated market, they may not be willing to share the...

In production economies, the extent to which non-equilibria are blocked depends on the allocation of control rights among shareholders, because a blocking coalition's resources are affected by the firms it jointly owns with outsiders. We formulate a notion of blocking that takes such...