Dear Colleagues,

In 2020, Nobel Laureates in Economic Sciences “started out with fundamental theory and later used their results in practical applications, which have spread globally; their discoveries are of great benefit to society.” This statement, as rightly claimed by Peter Fredriksson, Chair of the Prize Committee, perhaps summarizes well the motivation behind our proposed Special Issue, titled Auctions: Theory, Applications and (Lab and Field) Experiments, which welcomes the inclusion of topics related to the following keywords: common and private values; jump bidding; private information; signaling; discrete and continuous increments; online auctions; (lab and field) experiments.

Economic agents have always been assumed to sell things to the winning bidder or buy from them. In recent times, we have witnessed objects worth a wide range of money being auctioned (for example, the 3G, 4G and, more recently, 5G licenses for mobile networks). Theorists design different types of auctions; such game-theoretic modelling is important not just to understand a solution but also for practitioners to see how a real situation can be played out. As Paul Klemperer pointed out in his book, Auctions: Theory and Practice (2004), “when advising governments, auction designers (and economic policy-makers more generally) need to be sensitive to the dangers posed by political and administrative pressures.”

Real-world (physical or online such as eBay) auction sites use different variants of auction format that determine the outcomes based on the rules for bidding. It is thus important to analyze (both theoretically and from real datasets) the bidding strategies of bidders in a number of well-known auction formats, perhaps demonstrating that a specific format will satisfy a stated goal (such us to provide the seller the highest expected revenue, given the situation).

We also have a fairly broad body of literature on experiments on auctions. We thus encourage (both lab and field) experimentalists to submit their work for our Special Issue.

Prof. Dr. Indrajit Ray
Prof. Dr. Ricardo Gonçalves
Guest Editors

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• value
• bid
• private information
• signal
• discrete and continuous
• experiments