Extract

Auction theory is a field of economics that has been developed during the last 50 years starting from Vickrey’s (1961) seminal paper. Its evolution has been one of the most successful applications of game theory with remarkable episodes like the spectrum auctions in the 1990s; see Cramton (1995) and Binmore and Klemperer (2002). Nowadays, auction theory is a well-established branch of economics for which there exist influential handbooks covering the basic tools and applications, e.g. Krishna (2002),Milgrom (2004), Klemperer (2004) and Menezes and Monteiro (2008). In this survey, I am going to provide a revision of advances in the field that have taken place around the last decade. To do so, I will structure this survey as follows. It starts with an introductory section in which I summarize the basic tools that I refer to in the subsequent sections. Next, I emphasize the advances in three innovative areas: position auctions, Internet auctions and combinatorial auctions. I finish with a section summarizing some remarkable contributions to auction theory throughout the decade organized by topics.