I study the interaction between optimal procurement and outsourcing of production in small industries. First, two sellers decide about outsourcing. By outsourcing, a seller loses information about the costs of producing to his supplier. Then the buyer designs the procurement mechanism and...

Auctions are a popular and prevalent form of trading mechanism, despite the restriction that the seller cannot price-discriminate among potential buyers. To understand why this is the case, we consider an auction-like environment in which a seller with an indivisible object negotiates with two...

This paper analyzes an auction mechanism that excludes overoptimistic bidders inspired by the rules of the procurement auctions adopted by several Japanese local governments. Our theoretical and experimental results suggest that the endogenous exclusion rule reduces the probability of suffering...

This paper analyzes an all-pay auction where the winner is determined according to the sum of the bid and a handicap endowed to all players. The bidding strategy in equilibrium is then explicitly derived as a 'piecewise affine transformation' of the equilibrium strategy in an all-pay auction...

We consider situations where a society tries to efficiently allocate several homogeneous and indivisible goods among agents. Each agent receives at most one unit of the good. For example, suppose that a government wishes to allocate a fixed number of licenses to operate in its country to private...

We characterize the optimal bidding strategies of local and global bidders for two heterogenous licenses in a multi-unit simultaneous ascending auction. The global bidder wants to win both licenses to enjoy synergies; therefore, she bids more than her stand-alone valuation of a license. This...

Potential bidders respond to a seller's choice of auction mechanism for a common-value or affiliated-values asset by endogenous decisions whether to incur an information-acquisition cost (and observe a private estimate), or forgo competing. Privately informed participants decide whether to incur...

Electronic commerce has grown extraordinarily over the years, with online auctions being extremely successful forms of trade. Those auctions come in a variety of different formats, such as the Buy-It-Now auction format on eBay, that allows sellers to post prices at which buyers can purchase a...

We study an elimination tournament with heterogenous contestants whose ability is common-knowledge. Each pair-wise match is modeled as an all-pay auction where the winner gets the right to compete at the next round. Equilibrium efforts are in mixed strategies, yielding rather complex play...

We study the alternating-offers bargaining problem of assigning an indivisible and commonly valued object to one of two players in return for some payment among players. The players are asymmetrically informed about the object's value and have veto power over any settlement. There is no...