Second price allpay auctions (wars of attritions) have an evolutionarily stable equilibrium in pure strategies if valuations are private information. I show that for any level of uncertainty there exists a pure deviation strategy close to the equilibrium strategy such that for some valuations...

We study a sealed-bid auction between two bidders with asymmetric independent private values. The two bidders own asymmetric shares in a partnership. The higher bidder buys the lower bidder's shares at a per-unit price that is a convex combination of the two bids. The weight of the lower bid is...

A fundamental result of contest theory is that evenly matched contests are fought most intensely, implying that a contest designer maximizes effort from each contestant by artificially boosting the chances of the underdog. Such "handicapping" is credited with making sports contests more...

Brazil, Chile and other developing countries have recently experienced with forward or long-run contract auctions for electricity demand, to meet supply adequacy problems. In this paper, we analyze what it requires to have a competitive auction process for this type of contracts when each bidder...

We study how the outcomes of a private-value first price auction can vary with bidders information, for a fixed distribution of private values. In a two bidder, two value, setting, we characterize all combinations of bidder surplus and revenue that can arise, and identify the information...

This paper considers the problem of equilibrium selection in a common-value second-price auction with two bidders. We show that for each ex post equilibrium in continuous and undominated strategies of the common-value auction, a sequence of "almost common-value" auctions can be constructed such...

We study whether the mechanism design in the central bank liquidity auctions matters for the interbank money market interest rate levels and volatility. Furthermore, we compare different mechanisms to sell liquidity in terms of revenue, efficiency and auction stage interest rate levels and...

Discontinuous games, such as auctions, may require special tie-breaking rules to guarantee equilibrium existence. The best results available ensure equilibrium existence only in mixed strategy with endogenously defined tie-breaking rules and communication of private information. We show that an...

This paper studies the incentives faced by competing auctioneers who can release information to prospective bidders before bidders choose trading partners. I provide sufficient conditions that ensure the existence of a unique equilibrium in which both sellers release all available information....

We study experimentally the effect of bargaining power in two sequential mechanisms that offer the possibility to trade at a fixed price before an auction. In the “Buy-It-Now” format, the seller has the bargaining power and offers a price prior to the auction; whereas in the...