We provide new tools for studying asymmetric first price auctions, connecting their equilibria to the ρ-concavity of the underlying type distributions, and showing how one can use surplus expressions for symmetric auctions to bound equilibrium behavior in asymmetric auctions. We apply these tools to studying procurement auctions in which, as is common in practice, one seller is given an advanta...

We characterize revenue maximizing head starts for all-pay auctions and lottery contests with many heterogeneous players. We show that under optimal head starts all-pay auctions revenue-dominate lottery contests for any degree of heterogeneity among players. Moreover, all-pay auctions with optimal head starts induce higher revenue than any multiplicatively biased all-pay auction or lottery cont...

Teams of robots are more fault tolerant than single robots, and auctions appear to be promising means for coordinating them. In a recent paper at “Robotics: Science and Systems 2005,” we analyzed a coordination system based on sequential single-item auctions. We showed that the coordination system is simple to implement and computation and communication efficient, and that the resulting sum of ...

We study the extent to which communication can serve as a collusion device in one-shot firstand second-price sealed-bid auctions. Theoretically, second-price auctions are more fragile to collusion through communication than first-price auctions. In an array of laboratory experiments we vary the amount of interactions (communication and/or transfers without commitment) available to bidders. We f...

We examine procurement auctions for public works in Mumbai with the goal of understanding game theoretic values and optimal auction structures to recommend to policy makers in this context. We first convert an independent private values framework for traditional auctions to an analogous framework for procurement auctions. Then we use a fixed effects regression to estimate the idiosyncratic comp...

Online auctions differ from traditional auctions in several ways, but perhaps one of the most significant is the amount of time that bidders interact with the auction mechanism. This paper examines past findings in online auctions and discusses three psychological mechanisms through which bidders may increase their valuations of an item through interaction with the auction mechanism over time. ...

Ad auctions are generating massive amounts of revenue for online search engines such as Google. Yet, the level of expressiveness provided to participants in ad auctions could be significantly enhanced. An advantage of this could be improved competition and thus improved revenue to a seller of the right to advertise to a stream of search queries. In this paper, we outline the kinds of expressive...

In a wide variety of economic contexts, collections of single-object auctions are used to allocate multiple imperfectly substitutable objects. This paper studies how such collections of auctions aggregate into a multi-object auction market. We identify two features of auction-market design that enhance expected market e ciency: the individual auctions should be conducted in sequence, and inform...

Decision-making entities, whether they are businesses, governments, or individuals, usually interact in gametheoretic environments, in which the final outcome is tied to the actions taken by others in the environment. Auctions are examples of such game-theoretic environments with significant economic relevance. Internet advertising, of which a significant portion of transactions take place thro...

As auctions buyers and sellers become proliferated on the Internet, there are considerable interests in investigating consumer behavior in the new marketing context. Much of the research on online consumer behavior has focused on the economic dynamics of bidding and offerings, technical mechanism and privacy, while consumer trade-offs between auctions alternatives are still lacking in literatur...