We study the optimal mechanism in position auctions in a common-value setting where only ordinal information about the advertisers is posted and auctioneer revenue depends on consumer belief about ad qualities. We show that when bidder valuations are correlated, existence of a simple non-ironed...

How does investors' information about a country's fundamentals, and the fact that this information may be asymmetrically held, affect a country's financing cost? Motivated by this question, and by the observation that sovereign bonds are usually auctioned in large lots to a large number of...

We study all-pay auctions where each player observes her private value as well as a noisy private signal about the opponent’s value, following Fang and Morris’s (J Econ Theory 126(1):1–30, 2006) analysis of winner-pay auctions with multidimensional private signals. A unique symmetric...

We study optimal auctions in a symmetric private values setting, where bidders’ care about winning the object and a receiver’s inference about their type. We reestablish revenue equivalence when bidders’ signaling concerns are linear, and the auction makes participation observable via an...

This paper studies the problem of information provision in auctions. The linkage principle indicates that credibly revealing private information would benefit the seller, which implies that a seller should prefer a public reserve price to a secret one if the reserve price could reveal her...

This paper explores how a seller should transmit product information to bidders with horizontally differentiated preferences. Under cheap-talk, we show that, in an informative equilibrium, the seller provides less precise information for more popular product attributes. Second, for any given...

We develop a model where two players with asymmetric preferences engage in a contest game. The key novelty is the introduction of multi-dimensional rewards. We characterize the optimal prize allocation that maximizes aggregate effort. When heterogeneity in preferences is strong and the designer...

In a number of observed procurements, the buyer has employed an auction format that allows for a split-award outcome. We focus on settings where the range of uncertainty regarding scale economies is large and, depending on cost realizations, the efficient allocations include split-award outcomes...

In this paper, I study common-value auctions with two asymmetrically informed bidders and a reserve price. First, I consider a static auction in which one bidder has perfect information about the value of the object and the other does not have any private information. I derive the optimal...

If bidders are better informed than the seller about a common component of auction heterogeneity, the seller can allocate more efficiently by keeping her reserve price secret and revising it using submitted bids. We build a model of a first-price auction under unobserved auction...