The first part of the paper reports the results from a sequence of laboratory experiments comparing the bidding behavior for multiple contracts in three different sealed bid auction mechanisms; first-price simultaneous, first-price sequential and first-price combinatorial bidding. The design of...

We study sealed-bid auctions with financial externalities, i.e., auctions in which losers' utilities depend on how much the winner pays. In the unique symmetric equilibrium of the first-price sealed-bid auction (FPSB), larger financial externalities result in lower bids and in a lower expected...

Agents' valuations are interdependent if they depend on the signals of all agents. Previous literature has claimed that with interdependent valuations and multidimen-sional, but independent, signals, efficient auction design is impossible. This paper shows that, on the contrary, it is always...

Uniform-price auctions of a divisible good in fixed supply admit underpricing equilibria, where bidders submit high inframarginal bids to prevent competition on prices. The seller can obstruct this behavior by tilting her supply schedule and making the amount of divisible good on offer change...

We consider an auction setting in which potential buyers, even if they fail to obtain the good, care about the price paid by the winner. We study the impact of these price-externalities on the first-price auction and the second-price auction in a symmetric information framework. First, we...

Multi-unit auctions are sometimes plagued by the so-called exposure problem. In this paper, we analyze a simple game called the chopstick auction' in which bidders are confronted with the exposure problem. We analyze the chopstick auction with incomplete information both in theory and in a...

Within the independent private-values paradigm, we derive the data-generating process of the winning bid for the last unit sold at multi-unit sequential English auctions when bidder valuations are draws from different distributions; i.e., in the presence of asymmetries. When the identity of the...

We prove the existence of an increasing equilibrium, and study the comparative statics of correlation in the k-double auction with affiliated private values. This is supposedly the simplest bilateral trading mechanism that allows for dependence in valuations between buyers and sellers. In the...

This paper develops an economic argument relating auctions to high market prices. At the core of the argument is the claim that market competition and bidding in an auction should be analyzed as part of one game, where the pricing strategies in the market subgame depend on the bidding strategies...

We use perturbation analysis to study independent private-value all-pay auctions with weakly risk-averse buyers. We show that under weak risk aversion: 1) Buyers with low values bid lower and buyers with high values bid higher than they would bid in the risk neutral case. 2) Buyers with low...