René Kirkegaard

Welcome to my homepage. I’m an Associate Professor and the Canada Research Chair in Risk Management and Regulation in the Department of Economics, at the University of Guelph.

Contact: e-mail me or visit me in my office, MacKinnon 707.

Teaching: Courses will be on CourseLink.

CV: May 2012 version here.

Research: My research focuses on Auction Theory.

Please see below for past and ongoing research.

Publications (click here to view abstracts and earlier versions):

“Favoritism in Asymmetric Contests: Head Starts and Handicaps”, Games and Economic Behavior, forthcoming. [paper] [WP version]

“A Mechanism Design Approach to Ranking Asymmetric Auctions”, Econometrica, forthcoming (as a note). [paper] [online appendix]

“Asymmetric First Price Auctions”, Journal of Economic Theory, 144 (4): 1617-1635, July 2009. [paper] [earlier version]

“Buy-out Prices in Auctions: Seller Competition and Multi-Unit Demands” (with Per B. Overgaard), The RAND Journal of Economics, 39 (3): 770–789, Autumn 2008. [paper] [appendix]

“Comparative Statics and Welfare in Heterogeneous All-Pay Auctions: Bribes, Caps, and Performance Thresholds”, The B.E. Journal of Theoretical Economics, 8 (1): Article 21 (Topics), September 2008. [paper]

“Pre-Auction Offers in Asymmetric First-Price and Second-Price Auctions” (with Per B. Overgaard), Games and Economic Behavior, 63 (1): 145-165, 2008. [paper]

“A Short Proof of the Bulow-Klemperer Auctions vs. Negotiations Result”, Economic Theory, 28 (2), 449-452, 2006. [paper]

“Participation Fees vs. Reserve Prices in Auctions with Asymmetric or Colluding Buyers”, Economics Letters, 89(3), 328-332, 2005. [paper]

Papers:

“Handicaps in Incomplete Information All-Pay Auctions with a Diverse Set of Bidders”, December 2011. [paper]

- This paper previously circulated under the title “Preferential Treatment may Hurt: Another Application of the All-Pay Auction”. [paper]

“Using Economic Theory to Guide Numerical Analysis: Solving for Equilibria in Models of Asymmetric First-Price Auctions”, with Timothy P. Hubbard and Harry J. Paarsch, December 2011. [paper]

“Incomplete Information and Rent Dissipation in Deterministic Contests”, December 2011. [paper]

“A Poor Bidder’s Perspective on All-Pay Auctions: More Competitors, Please”, June 2011. [paper]

“Ranking Asymmetric Auctions using the Dispersive Order”, February 2011. [paper]

- A note based on parts of this paper is forthcoming in Econometrica as “A Mechanism Design Approach to Ranking Asymmetric Auctions”.

“Ranking Asymmetric Auctions: Filling the Gap between a Distributional Shift and Stretch”, January 2012. [paper]

- This paper is based on other parts of “Ranking Asymmetric Auctions using the Dispersive Order”, above.

“The Phantom Made Me Jump! Preemptive Jump Bidding in (Takeover) Auctions”, November 2006. [paper]

“Powerful Examples of First Price Auctions with Asymmetric or Colluding Bidders”, July 2006.

Other papers from my thesis:

“Inefficiency and Nonlinear Pricing in the Optimal Multi-Unit Auction”, May 2004. [paper] [February 2005 version]

“Auctions Versus Negotiations Revisited”, May 2004. [paper]

Last updated May 2012.