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....

Zheng has recently proposed a seller-optimal auction for (asymmetric) independentprivate- value environments where inter-bidder resale is possible. Zheng's construction requires novel conditions on the bidders' value distribution profile. We clarify the restrictions implied by these conditions....

A crucial assumption in the optimal auction literature has been that each bidder's valuation is known to be drawn from a single unique distribution. In this paper we relax this assumption and study the optimal auction problem when there is ambiguity about the distribution from which these...

A seller wishes to sell an object to one of multiple bidders. The valuations of the bidders are privately known. We consider the joint design problem in which the seller can decide the accuracy by which bidders learn their valuation and to whom to sell at what price. We establish that optimal...

A buyer seeks to procure a good characterized by its price and its quality from suppliers who have private information about their cost structure (fixed cost + marginal cost of providing quality). We solve for the optimal buying procedure, i.e. the procedure that maximizes the buyer's expected...

Search engines commonly use “sponsored linksâ€, where certain advertisers’ links are promoted to be placed above others in return for monetary payment. It is natural to assume that all providers value a higher ranked placement more than lower ranked ones. Then how should the...

We study multiple-unit asymmetric procurement auctions wherein sellers from two classes draw costs from dierent distributions. When sellers are asymmetric, a cost-minimizing buyer discriminates among classes of sellers to enhance competition [1]. Establishing a quota|a limit on the number of...