| This thesis is concerned with auctions, incentives and indivisibilities. It consists of three chapters.; Chapter 2 studies procurement auctions in which firms bid on both price and qualitative attributes. The standard way of taking qualitative attributes into account is to use score auctions. Menu auctions, which also take qualitative attributes into account and do not have the same difficulty of design as score auctions, are an alternative method. Our main goal is to study the properties and performance of menu auctions.; The expected payoff of a procurer is higher in a first-price menu auction than in a second-price and an English menu auction. Also, the expected payoff is higher in a first-price menu auction than in a price-only auction, the most commonly used method in procurement of differentiated products.; Menu auctions may encourage the participation of small (capacity-constrained) firms in procurements. Also, menu auctions are less vulnerable to corruption than score auctions.; Chapter 3 studies contests in spatial models. We consider an allocation method which shares each region among the participants proportionally to the amounts of resources they invest in it. Specifically, the following game is analyzed. Finite number of players compete on a spatial market. They have fixed amounts of resources to invest by allocating on the market. The number of total and individual investments share the market into different regions.; Pure strategy equilibria are characterized and it is shown that the equilibrium payoffs form a polyhedron unless the resource of a player is large compared to the sum of the other players' resources, in which case no equilibrium exists. The equilibrium characterization implies that firms' individual and total endowments do not have to be evenly distributed on the market.; Chapter 4 studies exchange markets with heterogeneous indivisible goods. We are interested in exchange rules that are efficient and immune to manipulations via endowments (either with respect to hiding or destroying part of the endowment or transferring part of the endowment to another trader). We consider three manipulability axioms: hiding-proofness, destruction-proofness, and transfer-proofness.; No rule satisfying efficiency and hiding proofness (which together imply individual rationality) exists. For two agents with separable and responsive preferences, efficient, individually rational, and destruction-proof rules exist. However, for some profiles of separable preferences, no rule is efficient, individually rational, and destruction-proof. In the case of transfer-proofess the compatibility with efficiency and individual rationality for the two-agent case extends to the unrestricted domain. If there are more than two agents, for some profiles of separable preferences, no rule is efficient, individually rational, and transfer-proof. |
