Search

This paper studies equilibrium behavior in a class of games that models asymmetric competitions with unconditional and conditional investments. Such competitions include lobbying settings, labor-market tournaments, and R&D races, among others. I provide an algorithm that constructs the unique equilibrium in these games and apply it to study competitions in which a fraction of each competitor's investment is sunk and the rest is paid only by the winners. Complete-information all-pay auctions are a special case. (JEL D44, D72, D82) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses status rewards used as incentives in organizations. The authors explain that with status rewards, an employee is given a positional good such as a job title or a medal. The study featured in the article uses a model with moral hazard and limited liability that limits the ability of an organization to reach its desired effort level using monetary incentives. The authors state that studies of brain activities found that when assessing the value of what they receive, humans make social comparisons. Several equations are presented to help illustrate the study.

We study first- and second-price auctions with resale in a model with independent private values. With asymmetric bidders, the resulting inefficiencies create a motive for post-auction trade which, in our model, takes place via monopoly pricingthe winner makes a take-it-or-leave-it offer to the loser. We show (a) a first-price auction with resale has a unique monotonic equilibrium; and (b) with resale, the expected revenue from a first-price auction exceeds that from a second-price auction. The inclusion of resale possibilities thus permits a general revenue ranking of the two auctions that is not available when these are excluded. (JEL D44) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the "generalized second-price" (GSP) auction, a new mechanism used by search engines to sell online advertising. Although GSP looks similar to the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism, its properties are very different. Unlike the VCG mechanism, GSP generally does not have an equilibrium in dominant strategies, and truth-telling is not an equilibrium of GSP. To analyze the properties of GSP, we describe the generalized English auction that corresponds to GSP and show that it has a unique equilibrium. This is an ex post equilibrium, with the same payoffs to all players as the dominant strategy equilibrium of VCG. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]