We study auctions in which the number of potential bidders is large, such as in Internet auctions. With numerous bidders, the expected revenue and the optimal bid function in a first price auction result in complicated expressions, except for a few simple distribution function for the bidders'...

This paper develops one possible argument why auctioning licenses to op-erate in an aftermarket may lead to higher prices in the aftermarket comparedto a more random allocation mechanism. Key ingredients in the argumentare differences in firms' risk attitudes and the fact that future market...

A government officials' propensity to corruption, or corruptibility, can be affected by his intertemporal preference over job benefits. Through a dynamic model of rent-seeking behavior, this paper examines how endogenously determined corruptibility changes with monitoring intensity, salary...

This paper studies markets plagued with asymmetric information on the quality of traded goods. In Akerlof's setting, sellers are better informed than buyers. In contrast, we examine cases where buyers are better informed than sellers. This creates an inverse adverse selection problem: The market...

We experimentally examine the effectiveness of antitrust policies against bidding rings in theEnglish auction (EN) and the first-price sealed-bid auction (FP). We consider both traditionalantitrust policy (without a leniency program) and modern antitrust policy (with a leniencyprogram). In EN,...

In a door-to-door fundraising field experiment, we study the impact of fundraising mechanisms on charitable giving. We approached about 4500 households, each participating in either an all-pay auction, a lottery, a non-anonymous voluntary contribution mechanism (VCM), or an anonymous VCM. In...

Internet auctions attract numerous agents, but only a few become active bidders. A major difficulty in the structural analysis of internet auctions is that the number of potential bidders is unknown. Under the independent private value paradigm (IPVP)the valuations of the active bidders form a...

The Babylonian bridal auction, described by Herodotus, is regarded as one of the earliest uses of an auction in history. Yet, to our knowledge, the literature lacks a formal equilibrium analysis of this auction. We provide such an analysis for the twoplayer case with complete and incompete...

This paper presents a unified framework for characterizing symmetric equilibrium in simultaneous move, two-player, rank-order contests with complete information, in which each player's strategy generates direct or indirect affine spillover effects that depend on the rank-order of her decision...

Unique-lowest sealed-bid auctions are auctions in which participation is endogenous and the winning bid is the lowest bid among all unique bids. Such auctions admit very many Nash equilibria (NEs) in pure and mixed strategies. The two-bidders' auction is similar to the Hawk-Dove game, which...