Overbidding in sealed-bid second-price auctions (SPAs) has been shown to be persistent and associated with cognitive ability. We study experimentally to what extent cross-game learning can reduce overbidding in SPAs, taking into account cognitive skills. Employing an order-balanced design, we...

We analyze a repeated first-price auction in which the types of the players are determined before the first round. It is proved that if every player is using either a belief-based learning scheme with bounded recall or a generalized fictitious play learning scheme, then for sufficiently large...

We present results of several experiments that deal with endogenous entry in auctions and auction valuation. One observation that is constant across all of the experiments we report is that laboratory subjects have a difficult time evaluating potential gains from auctions. Even after they are...

We analyze a repeated first-price auction in which the types of the players are determined before the first round. It is proved that if every player is using either a belief-based learning scheme with bounded recall or generalized fictitious play learning scheme, then for sufficiently large...

We consider a two-player contest for a prize of common but uncertain value. We show that less resources are spent in equilibrium if one party is privately informed about the value of a prize than if either both agents are informed or neither agent is informed. Furthermore, the uninformed agent...

We derive the optimal incentive compatible and individually rational mechanisms to reallocate arbitrary given ownership shares among a set of agents. These mechanisms are optimal in the sense that they maximize social surplus of the final allocation subject to the aforementioned constraints and...

We study optimal selling strategies of a seller who is poorly informed about the buyer’s value for the object. When the maxmin seller only knows that the mean of the distribution of the buyer’s valuations belongs to some interval then nature can keep him to payoff zero no matter how much...

Despite negative experiences with auctioning off subsidies for renewable energy in some countries, tenders are increasingly used today. We develop a reverse auction which accounts for particularities of intermittent renewable energy sources. Determining the quantity, demanded by the regulator,...

We develop a novel theory of real estate foreclosure auctions, which have the special feature that the lender acts as a seller for low and as a buyer for high prices. The theory yields several empirically testable predictions concerning the strategic behavior of the agents, both under symmetric...

We analyze the doping behavior of heterogeneous athletes in an environment of private information. In a n-player strategic game, modeled as an all-pay auction, each athlete has private information about his actual physical ability and choses the amount of performance-enhancing drugs. The use of...