Consider a contest for a prize in which each player knows his own ability, but may or may not know those of his rivals (the complete or incomplete information regimes). Our main result is that, if the value of the prize is high, more e¤ort and output are engendered under incomplete information;...

A budget-constrained buyer wants to purchase items from a short-listed set. Items are differentiated by observable quality and sellers have private reserve prices for their items. The buyer’s problem is to select a subset of maximal quality. Money does not enter the buyer’s...

We study optimal procurement in the presence of default risk. Contractors differ in the penalty they suffer in case of default, which is private information. If the loss to the procurer from non-completion is high relative to the cost of completion, the optimal mechanism is to assign the project...

We investigate the role of market transparency in repeated first-price auctions. We consider a setting with private and independent values across bidders. The values are assumed to be perfectly persistent over time. We analyze the first-price auction under three distinct disclosure regimes...

We extend the all-pay auctions analysis of Krishna and Morgan (1997) to a stochastic competition setting. In the war of attrition it does not directly follow from the first order condition that the bidding equilibrium strategy is a weighted average of the bidding equilibrium strategies that...

In this paper we consider equilibrium behavior in a Dutch (descending price) auction where the bidders are uninformed of their valuations with probability 1-q and can acquire information about their valuation at a positive cost during the auction. We assume that the information acquisition...

In a non-cooperative oligopoly model where firms use simple linear prices, Klemperer (1987) has shown that the existence of consumers’ switching costs may generate monopoly like prices, and thereby create substantial loss in welfare. We show that when allowing firms to use two-part tariffs,...

We consider an asymmetric auction setting with two bidders such that the valuation of each bidder has a binary support. We prove that in this context the second price auction yields a higher expected revenue than the first price auction for a broad set of parameter values, although the opposite...

We consider an auction environment where an object can be sold with usage restrictions that generate benefits to the seller but decrease buyers' valuations. In this environment, sellers such as the FCC have used "contingent re-auctions," offering the restricted object with a reserve price, but...

We consider a takeover in which risk neutral bidders must incur participation costs and study their optimal strategy. We found that bidders decision of participation is endogenous. There is a threshold of private participation cost above that a potential bidder will stay out of takeover process....