This paper characterizes the optimal first-price auction (FPA) and second-price auction (SPA) for selling rights, contracts, or licenses that involve ensuing payoff uncertainty for the winning bidder. The distribution of the random payoff is common knowledge, except that bidders have private...

We study identification and estimation in first-price auctions with risk-averse bidders and selective entry, building on a flexible entry and bidding framework we call the Affiliated Signal with Risk Aversion (AS-RA) model. This framework extends the AS model of Gentry and Li (2014) to...

Overbidding in auctions has been attributed to e.g. risk aversion, loser regret, level-k, and cursedness, relying on varying identifying assumptions. I argue that "type projection" organizes these findings and largely captures observed behavior. Type projection formally models that people tend...

This paper develops a methodology for characterizing expected revenue from auctions when bidders' types come from an arbitrary distribution. In particular, types may be multidimensional, and there may be mass points in the distribution. One application extends existing revenue equivalence...

I study the canonical private value auction model for a single good without the quasilinearity restriction. I assume only that bidders are risk averse and the indi- visible good for sale is a normal good. I show that removing quasilinearity leads to qualitatively different solutions to the...