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...

Auctions are nowadays a popular and frequently employed market mechanism in electronicmarkets. In economic literature, the success of electronic auctions has been largelyattributed to the reduction of transaction costs, the large number of potential buyers,and the independence of time and space....

Though auctions show a prevailing dominance in electronic markets, our understanding of howauctions work on human behaviour is still rather limited. In this paper we analyse the impact ofemotional processes on the decision making of human agents in electronic auctions. The analysis isbased on a...

Two auction mechanisms are studied in which players compete with one another for an exogenously determined prize by independently submitting integer bids in some discrete and commonly known strategy space specified by the auctioneer. In the unique lowest (highest) bid auction game, the winner of...

The unmediated call auction is a useful trading mechanism to aggregate dispersedinformation. Its ability to incorporate information of a single informed insider,however, is less well understood. We analyse this question by presenting a simplecall auction game where both auction prices and limit...