I suggest explanations for the apparently puzzling bidding in the year 2000 British and German 3G telecom auctions. Relative-performance maximisation may have been important, but the outcome of the British auction seems to have been efficient. This paper bundles my comments on two papers presented at the December 2001 CES Ifo conference on the telecom auctions. (For those readers new to the sub...

This article studies scoring auctions, a procedure commonly used to buy differentiated products. suppliers submit offers on all dimensions of the good (price, level ofnonmonetary attributes), and these are evaluated using a scoring rule. We provide a systematic analysis of equilibrium behavior in scoring auctions when suppliers 'private information is multidimensional (characterization of equil...

We give a simple characterization of all single-item truthrevealing auctions under some mild (and natural) assumptions about the auctions. Our work opens up the possibility of using variational calculus to design auctions having desired properties.

We empirically study how the interplay between entry and subcontracting choices is affected by the use of different auctions formats in public procurement. The differencein-differences strategy used exploits a dataset of auctions for public works run alternately under first price and average bid auctions. We find that the use of first price auctions causes a marked decline in both entry and sub...

We introduce and study share-averse auctions, a class of auctions with allocation externalities, in which items can be allocated to arbitrarily many bidders, but the valuation of each individual bidder decreases as the items get allocated to more other bidders. For single-item auctions where players have incomplete information about each others’ valuation, we characterize the truthful mechanism...

Sequential auctions of homogeneous objects are common in public and private marketplaces. Weber derived equilibrium results for what is now a classic model of sequential auctions. However, Weber’s results are derived in the context of two particular price quote assumptions. In this paper, we examine a model of sequential auctions based on online auctions, in which, after each auction, all bids ...

The ability to discover equilibrium prices efficiently makes auctions an effective way to trade goods. One of the recent trends in the development of auctions is combinatorial auctions. Combinatorial auctions allow the simultaneous sale of more than one item. In the existing literature, the factor of transportation cost has not been considered in combinatorial auctions. In this paper, we formul...

We use the experimental method to compare second-price auctions with verifiable multilateral negotiations in which the sole buyer can credibly reveal to sellers the best price offer he currently holds. Despite the two institutions seeming equivalence, we find that prices are lower in verifiable multilateral negotiations than in second-price auctions. The difference occurs because low-cost selle...