Related papers: Heavy Tails Make Happy Buyers
An indivisible object may be sold to one of $n$ agents who know their valuations of the object. The seller would like to use a revenue-maximizing mechanism but her knowledge of the valuations' distribution is scarce: she knows only the…
We consider a repeated auction where the buyer's utility for an item depends on the time that elapsed since his last purchase. We present an algorithm to build the optimal bidding policy, and then, because optimal might be impractical, we…
I construct a novel random double auction as a robust bilateral trading mechanism for a profit-maximizing intermediary who facilitates trade between a buyer and a seller. It works as follows. The intermediary publicly commits to charging a…
A seller offers an asset in a decentralised market. Buyers have private signals about their common value. I study whether the market becomes allocatively more efficient with (i) more buyers, (ii) better-informed buyers. Both increase the…
One method to offer some bidders a discount in a first-price auction is to augment their bids when selecting a winner but only charge them their original bids should they win. Another method is to use their original bids to select a winner,…
A speculator can take advantage of a procurement auction by acquiring items for sale before the auction. The accumulated market power can then be exercised in the auction and may lead to a large enough gain to cover the acquisition costs. I…
This paper studies the incentives of the seller and buyers to shill bid in a single-item auction. An auction is seller identity-compatible if the seller cannot profit from pretending to be one or more bidders via fake identities. It is…
A common practice in many auctions is to offer bidders an opportunity to improve their bids, known as a Best and Final Offer (BAFO) stage. This final bid can depend on new information provided about either the asset or the competitors. This…
This paper extends the incomplete model of Haile and Tamer (2003) from static English auctions to sequential English auctions. Because bidders may wait for future opportunities, the static condition that bidders do not let rivals win at…
A seller with one unit of a good faces N\geq3 buyers and a single competitor who sells one other identical unit in a second-price auction with a reserve price. Buyers who do not get the seller's good will compete in the competitor's…
We consider heavy-tailed distributions and compare the well-known estimators of the tail index, based on extreme value theory with a comparatively recent estimator based on a different idea.
We use a series of pre-registered, incentive-compatible online experiments to investigate how people evaluate and choose among different waiting time distributions. Our main findings are threefold. First, consistent with prior literature,…
In many online advertisement (ad) exchanges, ad slots are each sold via a separate second-price auction. This paper considers the bidder's problem of maximizing the value of ads they purchase in these auctions, subject to budget…
In a two-round auction, a subset of bidders is selected (probabilistically), according to their bids in the first round, for the second round, where they can increase their bids. We formalize the two-round auction model, restricting the…
Auction theory traditionally assumes that bidders' valuation distributions are known to the auctioneer, such as in the celebrated, revenue-optimal Myerson auction. However, this theory does not describe how the auctioneer comes to possess…
We study the design of prior-independent auctions in a setting with heterogeneous bidders. In particular, we consider the setting of selling to $n$ bidders whose values are drawn from $n$ independent but not necessarily identical…
Classic results show that even an arbitrarily small correlation across bidders' information can enable full surplus extraction in auctions and related mechanism design settings. Motivated by this fragility, we study the information…
Handling multiplicity without losing much power has been a persistent challenge in various fields that often face the necessity of managing numerous statistical tests simultaneously. Recently, $p$-value combination methods based on…
Consider a seller that intends to auction some item. The seller can invest money and effort in advertising in different market segments in order to recruit $n$ bidders to the auction. Alternatively, the seller can have a much cheaper and…
Shill bidding occurs when fake bids are introduced into an auction on the seller's behalf in order to artificially inflate the final price. This is typically achieved by the seller having friends bid in her auctions, or the seller controls…