This paper considers all-pay contests in which the relationship between bids and allocation reflects a small amount of noise. Prior work had focused on one particular equilibrium. However, there may be other equilibria. To address this issue, we introduce a new and intuitive measure for the...

Two experimental treatments are used to study the effects of auction risk across five mechanisms. The first canonical, baseline treatment features only strategic risk and replicates the standard results that overbidding relative to the risk neutral Nash equilibrium is prevalent in all common...

This paper considers all-pay contests in which the relationship between bids and allocations reflects a small amount of noise. Prior work had focused on one particular equilibrium. However, there may be other equilibria. To address this issue, we introduce a new and intuitive measure for the...

We study optimal auctions in a symmetric private values setting, where bidders' care about winning the object and a receiver's inference about their type. We reestablish revenue equivalence when bidders' signaling concerns are linear, and the auction makes participation observable via an entry...

This paper studies a model of mechanism design with transfers where agents' preferences need not be quasilinear. In such a model, (1) we characterize dominant strategy incentive compatible mechanisms using a monotonicity property; (2) we establish a revenue uniqueness result: for every dominant...

We characterize revenue maximizing mechanisms in a common value environment where the value of the object is equal to the highest of bidders’ independent signals. If the object is optimally sold with probability one, then the optimal mechanism is simply a posted price, with the highest...

We use a Tullock-type contest model to show that intuitively and structurally different contests can be strategically and revenue equivalent to each other. We consider a two-player contest, where outcome-contingent payoffs are linear functions of prizes, own effort, and the effort of the rival....

We analyze competitive pressures in a sequence of auctions with a growing number of bidders, in a model that includes private and common valuations as special cases. We show that the key determinant of bidders' surplus (and implicitly auction revenue) is how the goods are distributed. In any...

We study the effect of cross-shareholding among two competing firms on their bidding behavior and the expected sales revenue for the seller in an auction environment. The bidders’ private signals are independent, and the model encompasses the private values model and a particular common value...