The conventional wisdom in the auction design literature is that first price sealed bid auctions tend to make more money while ascending auctions tend to be more efficient. We re-examine these issues in an environment in which bidders are allowed to endogenously choose in which auction format to...

A seller wishes to sell an object to one of multiple bidders. The valuations of the bidders are privately known. We consider the joint design problem in which the seller can decide the accuracy by which bidders learn their valuation and to whom to sell at what price. We establish that optimal...

Most prior theoretical and experimental work involving auction choice has assumed bidders only find out their value after making a choice of which auction to enter. In this paper we examine whether or not subjects knowing their value prior to making an auction choice impacts their choice...

A seller wishes to sell an object to one of multiple bidders. The valuations of the bidders are privately known. We consider the joint design problem in which the seller can decide the accuracy by which bidders learn their valuation and to whom to sell at what price. We establish that optimal...

This paper studies the relationship between the auctioneer's provision of information and the level of competition in private value auctions. We use a general notion of informativeness which allows us to compare the efficient with the (privately) optimal amount of information provided by the...

During the 19th century, poor and orphan Swedish children were boarded out. The foster-parents' compensation was determined in English auctions. Some children were re-auctioned. We use historical data from such auctions to study whether informational asymmetry and possibly adverse selection...

Consider an all-pay auction with interdependent, affiliated valuations and private budget constraints. We characterize a symmetric equilibrium for the case of two players. In contrast with the second-price auction, making budgets more severe can depress the bids of unconstrained bidders

We study a situation in which an auctioneer wishes to sell an object to one of N risk-neutral bidders with heterogeneous preferences. The auctioneer does not know bidders' preferences but has private information about the characteristics of the object, and must decide how much information to...

This paper studies the relationship between the auctioneer's provision of information and the level of competition in private value auctions. We use a general notion of informativeness which allows us to compare the efficient with the (privately) optimal amount of information provided by the...

We consider all-pay auctions in the presence of interdependent, affiliated valuations and private budget constraints. For the sealed-bid, all-pay auction we characterize a symmetric equilibrium in continuous strategies for the case of N bidders and we investigate its properties. Budget...