This paper studies optimal auction design when the seller can affect the buyersʼ valuations through an unobservable ex ante investment. The key insight is that the optimal mechanism may have the seller play a mixed investment strategy so as to create correlation between the buyersʼ otherwise...

I examine a contest with identity-dependent rules in which contestants are privately informed and ex ante heterogeneous. A contestant may suffer from a handicap or benefit from a head start. The former reduces the contestantʼs score by a fixed percentage; the latter is an additive bonus....

We study a sealed-bid auction between two bidders with asymmetric independent private values. The two bidders own asymmetric shares in a partnership. The higher bidder buys the lower bidderʼs shares at a per-unit price that is a convex combination of the two bids. The weight of the lower bid is...

In a deterministic contest or all-pay auction, all rents are dissipated when information is complete and contestants are identical. As one contestant becomes “stronger”, that is, values the prize more, total expenditures are known to decrease monotonically. Thus, asymmetry among contestants...

This paper examines the optimal mechanism design problem when buyers have uncertain valuations. This uncertainty can only be resolved after the actual transactions take place and upon incurring significant post-purchase cost. We focus on two different settings regarding how the seller values a...

We consider mechanisms that provide traders the opportunity to exchange commodity i for commodity j, for certain ordered pairs ij. Given any connected graph G of opportunities, we show that there is a unique mechanism M_G that satisfies some natural conditions of "fairness" and "convenience."...

We study two-player common-value all-pay auctions (contests) with asymmetric information under the assumption that one of the players has an information advantage over his opponent. We characterize the unique equilibrium in these contests, and examine the role of information in determining the...

We study equilibria in second price auctions when bidders are independently and privately informed about both their values and participation costs and their joint distributions across bidders are not necessarily identical. We show that there always exists an equilibrium in this general setting...

The paper is the first to derive and analyse theoretically the equilibrium properties of 'revenue neutral auctions', in the context of tradable pollution rights. By 'revenue neutrality' we mean that the objective of the agency distributing the rights is not to maximize earnings from the auction...

The paper is the first to derive and analyse theoretically the equilibrium properties of 'revenue neutral auctions', in the context of tradable pollution rights. By 'revenue neutrality' we mean that the objective of the agency distributing the rights is not to maximize earnings from the auction...