This paper studies optimal auction design when the seller can affect the buyers' valuations through an unobservable ex ante investment. The key insight is that the optimal mechanism may have the seller play a mixed investment strategy so as to create correlation between the otherwise...

A budget-constrained buyer wants to purchase items from a shortlisted set. Items are differentiated by observable quality and sellers have private reserve prices for their items. Sellers quote prices strategically, inducing a knapsack game. The buyer's problem is to select a subset of maximal...

Private provision of public goods often takes place as a war of attrition: individuals wait until someone else volunteers and provides the good. After a certain time period, however, one individual may be randomly selected. If the individuals are uncertain about their cost of provision, but can...

A model is presented of a uniform price auction where bidders compete in demand schedules; the model allows for common and private values in the absence of exogenous noise. It is shown how private information yields more market power than the levels seen with full information. Results obtained...

A finite number of sellers (n) compete in schedules to supply an elastic demand. The costs of the sellers have uncertain common and private value components and there is no exogenous noise in the system. A Bayesian supply function equilibrium is characterized; the equilibrium is privately...

This paper suggests a potential rationale for the recent empirical finding that overconfident agents tend to self-select into more competitive environments (e.g. Dohmen and Falk, 2006). In particular, it shows that moderate overconfidence in a contest can improve the agent's performance relative...

We characterize pure strategy equilibria of common value multi-unit uniform price auctions under the framework of initial public offerings, where bidders have incomplete private information regarding the value of shares and submit discrete demand schedules. We show that there exists a continuum...

The popularity of open ascending auctions is often attributed to the fact that openly observable bidding allows to aggregate dispersed information. Another reason behind the frequent utilization of open auction formats may be that they activate revenue enhancing biases. In an experiment, we...

This paper analyzes a common-value, first-price auction with state-dependent participation. The number of bidders, which is unobservable to them, depends on the true value. For participation patterns with many bidders in each state, the bidding equilibrium may be of a "pooling" type---with high...

A single seller faces a sequence of buyers with unit demand. The buyers are forward-looking and long-lived. Each buyer has private information about his arrival time and valuation where the latter evolves according to a geometric Brownian motion. Any incentive-compatible mechanism has to induce...