A long-standing unsolved problem, often arising from auctions with multidimensional bids, is how to design seller-optimal auctions when bidders' private characteristics ("types") differ in many dimensions. This paper solves the problem, assuming bidder-types stochastically independent across...

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

Existence of a monotone pure-strategy perfect Bayesian equilibrium is proved for a multistage game of first-price auctions with interbidder resale, with any finite number of ex ante different bidders. Endogenous gains at resale complicate the winner’s curse and upset previous fixed-point...

A model of English auctions is proposed to incorporate the possibility of jump bidding. When two objects are sold separately via such auctions, bidders signal their willingness to pay via jump bids, thereby forming rational expectations of the prices without relying on any central mediator....

Majority rules are frequently used to decide whether or not a public good should be provided, but will typically fail to achieve an efficient provision. We provide a worst-case analysis of the majority rule with an optimally chosen majority threshold, assuming that voters have independent...

Zheng has proposed a seller-optimal auction for (asymmetric) independent-privatevalue environments where inter-bidder resale is possible. Zheng's construction requires novel conditions '€" Resale Monotonicity, Transitivity, and Invariance '€" on the bidders' value distribution profile. The...

We show that, in environments with independent private values and transferable utility, a privately informed principal can implement a contract that is ex-ante optimal for her. As an application, we consider a bilateral exchange environment (Myerson and Satterthwaite, 1983) in which the...

In standard auctions with symmetric, independent private value bidders resale creates a role for a speculator'€"a bidder who is commonly known to have no use value for the good on sale. For second-price and English auctions the efficient value-bidding equilibrium coexists with a continuum of...

The existence of a linear equilibrium in Kyle's model of market making with multiple, symmetrically informed strategic traders is implied for any number of strategic traders if the joint distribution of the underlying exogenous random variables is elliptical. The reverse implication has been...

We show that a solution to the problem of mechanism selection by an informed principal exists in a large class of environments with “generalized private values”: the agents’ payoff functions are independent of the principal’s type. The solution is an extension of Maskin and Tirole’s...