Professor Phil Haile

An oil lease auction is the classic example motivating a common values model. However, formal testing for common values has been hindered by unobserved auction-level heterogeneity, which is likely to affect both participation in an auction and bidders' willingness to pay. We develop and apply an empirical approach for first-price sealed bid auctions with affiliated values, unobserved heterogeneity, and endogenous bidder entry.

Empirical models of demand for - and, often, supply of – differentiated products are widely used in practice, typically employing parametric functional forms and distributions of consumer heterogeneity. Here, the authors review some recent work studying identification in a broad class of such models.

The authors present new results on the identifiability of a class of nonseparable nonparametric simultaneous equations models introduced by Matzkin (2008).