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...

Dynamic clock auctions with drop-out information typically yield outcomes closer to equilibrium predictions than do comparable sealed-bid auctions. However, clock auctions require congregating bidders for a fixed time interval, which has limited field applicability and introduces inefficiencies of its own given the time cost of congregating bidders. In this experiment we explore the effects of ...

This paper considers equilibrium in transaction mechanisms. In an environment with homogeneous buyers and sellers, which eliminates the advantage auctions possess of matching buyers and sellers, both auctions and bargaining are equilibria. However, only auctions are evolutionarily stable. This identifies a new advantage of auctions over bargaining, arising from the division of the gains from tr...

Online auctions have become a quite popular and effective approach in the Internet-based eMarketplace. In concurrent auctions, where multiple auctions for identical items are running simultaneously, users’ bidding behaviors become very complicated. This situation motivates shilling behaviors, in which a seller disguises himself as normal bidders in order to drive up the bidding price and make t...

Reverse auctions and negotiations are two common procurement mechanisms. The drawback of many auctions is their sole focus on price. The drawback of negotiations is that they are sequential, slow and costly. Internet enables multi-attribute auctions and multi-bilateral multi-attribute negotiations efficiently. In both processes concession-making plays a key role. The paper presents typology of ...

abstract While previous studies on buy-it-now (BIN) auctions focus on the impact of BIN format on economic performances, our study focuses on factors that affect the level of use of BIN auctions by sellers. We propose a conceptual model where culture and product categories are two important factors on the level of use of BIN auctions. Our empirical investigation shows that the level of use of B...

The growth of auctions on the Internet raises new theoretical questions, provides a wealth of data on bidding behavior in auctions, and presents new opportunities for running experiments in the field. The present paper reports the results of a field experiment on the effects of closing rules on auction outcomes. Different auction sites have adopted different closing rules. On eBay, auctions hav...