Evidence suggests that people evaluate outcomes relative to expectations. I analyze this expectation-based loss aversion (Köszegi and Rabin (2006, 2009)) in the context of dynamic and static auctions, where the reference point is given by the (endogenous) equilibrium outcome. If agents update...

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 compare the expected revenue in first- and second-price auctions with asymmetric bidders. We consider “close to uniform” distributions with identical supports and show that in the case of identical supports the expected revenue in second-price auctions may exceed that in first-price...

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....

The revenue equivalence theorem is an widely known result in Auction Theory. This note generalize that theorem for the case of Sequential Auctions. Our results show that under a class of Sequential Auction, if an symmetric and increasing equilibrium bidding strategy exists, then the revenue...

We study security-bid auctions in which bidders compete for an asset by bidding with securities. That is, they offer payments that are contingent on the realized value of the asset being sold. Standard auction mechanisms (such as first-price and second-price auctions) are not well defined unless...

We examine an environment where goods and privately informed buyers arrive stochastically to a market. A seller in this setting faces a sequential allocation problem with a changing population. We characterize the set of incentive compatible allocation rules and provide a generalized revenue...

Many empirical studies of auctions show that prices of identical goods sold sequentially follow a declining path. Declining prices have been viewed as an anomaly, because the theoretical models of auctions predict that the price sequence should either be a martingale (with independent signals...

We study endogenous-participation auctions where bidders only know the number of potential participants. After seeing their values for the object, potential participants decide whether or not to enter the auction. They may not want to enter the auction since they have to pay participation costs....