Each year, multi-stage auctions of one form or another sell or let billions of dollars worth of goods and contracts. Yet despite the significance of such auctions, the existing theory of auctions and competitive bidding fails to explain why a bid taker might prefer a multi-stage auction to a,...

Auctions and bidding models are attracting an ever increasing amount of attention. The Stark and Rothkopf (Stark, R. M., M. H. Rothkopf. 1979. Competitive bidding: a comprehensive bibliography. Oper. Res. 27 (2) 364--390.) bibliography includes approximately 500 works in the area. Additional...

The theory of auction design examines how various factors affect the outcome of an auction. Most of the existing literature focuses on how varying the amount of information available to each bidder affects the bid-taker's expected revenue when all other factors remain constant. This paper...

Increasingly simulations have been required as supportive evidence to management of proposed system changes. It has long been recognized that the computer running costs of simulations are strongly influenced by the synchronization mechanism used. Recently the time indexed list has been proposed...

This paper presents an equilibrium explanation for the persistence of naive bidding. Specifically, we consider a common value auction in which a "naive" bidder (who ignores the winner's curse) competes against a fully rational bidder. We show that the naive bidder earns higher equilibrium...

Concurrent auctions of several objects are traditionally analyzed as if they were independent single-object auctions. Such an approximation may be very crude if bidders have budgetary restrictions, capacity constraints, or, in general, have non-linear utility functions. This paper presents a...

While most models of auctions and competitive bidding assume that each bidder's utility for an outcome depends only on his own profit, we allow the utility to also depend on any regret that a bidder suffers after the fact and characterize when and how this affects bidding. Specifically, a winner...