Unanimous voting as the fundamental procedural source of political legitimacy grants veto power to each individual. We present an axiomatic characterization of a class of bidding processes to spell out the underlying egalitarian values for collective projects of a productive state. At heart of...

We develop a competitive equilibrium theory of a market for votes. Before voting on a binary issue, individuals may buy and sell their votes with each other. We define the concept of ex ante vote-trading equilibrium, and show by construction that an equilibrium exists. The equilibriumwe...

This paper proposes an approach to proving nonparametric identification for distributions of bidders' values in asymmetric second-price auctions. I consider the case when bidders have independent private values and the only available data pertain to the winner's identity and the transaction...

I present a two-player nested contest which is a convex combination of two widely studied contests: the Tullock (lottery) contest and the all-pay auction. A Nash equilibrium exists for all parameters of the nested contest. If and only if the contest is sufficiently asymmetric, then there is an...

Recently, the combinatorial clock auction has become more and more common in the auctioning of telecommunication licenses. Although the auction design is complex, the promise is that bidding becomes simple - truthtelling is close to optimal. We show that this claim is too strong. The auction...

This paper analyzes the signaling effect of bidding in a two-round elimination contest. Before the final round, bids in the preliminary round are revealed and act as signals of the contestants' private valuations. Depending on his valuation, a contestant may have an incentive to bluff or sandbag...

The form of contests for a single fixed prize can be determined by a designer who maximizes the contestants' efforts. This paper establishes that, under common knowledge of the two asymmetric contestants' prize valuations, a fair Tullock-type endogenously determined lottery is always superior to...

The bidder who wins at an auction may end up paying more for an asset than it is actually worth. This, stated very simply, is the so-called winner's curse. Consider the simplest possible case where the asset has the same actual value to all bidders, but bidders do not know for certain what that...

Auction fever is a multifaceted phenomenon thatis frequently observed in both traditional and Internetauctions. In order to gain a better understanding of itscauses, we develop a conceptual framework to analyzeemotions in auctions, which is based on an exhaustiveliterature review. The framework...

Recent research strengthens the conjecture that human decision-making stems from a complexinteraction of rational judgment and emotional processes. A prominent example of the impact ofemotions in economic decision-making is the effect of regret-related information feedback on biddingbehaviour in...