Essays on Almost Common Value Auctions

Essays on Almost Common Value Auctions PDF Author: Susan L. Rose
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Auctions
Languages : en
Pages : 88

Get Book Here

Book Description
Abstract: In a common value auction, the value of the object for sale is the same to all bidders. In an almost common value auction, one bidder, the advantaged bidder, values the object slightly more than the other, regular bidders. With only two bidders, a slight advantage is predicted to have an explosive effect on the outcome and revenue of an auction. The advantaged bidder always wins and revenue decreases dramatically relative to the pure common value auction. Ascending auctions, which reduce to two bidders, are thought to be particularly vulnerable to the explosive effect, which may discourage entry. My dissertation investigates the explosive effect in experimental English clock auctions. The first essay, "An Experimental Investigation of the Explosive Effect in Almost Common Value Auctions," uses a two-bidder wallet game to test these predictions. I find the effect of an advantage to be proportional, not explosive, confirming past studies. I develop a behavioral model that predicts the proportional effect and test it against the data. The model has two types of bidders: naïve and sophisticated. Naïve bidders use a rule of thumb bidding function while sophisticated bidders are fully rational and account for the probability that a rival is naïve or sophisticated when best responding. I was able to classify subjects as naïve or sophisticated, and those classified as sophisticated do have a better understanding of the game. However, all subjects suffered from the winner's curse, which may have masked the explosive effect and been exacerbated by the structure of the wallet game. The second essay, "Bidding in Almost Common Value Auctions: An Experiment," moves the analysis to a four bidder auction to directly test the entry predictions. I used a more intuitive common value structure and controlled for the winner's curse by using subjects with prior experience in common value auctions. I found that although subjects did not suffer from the winner's curse, there is no evidence of an explosive effect. Advantaged bidders won no more auctions than predicted by chance. Entry and auction revenue were unaffected by the presence of advantaged bidders.

Essays on Almost Common Value Auctions

Essays on Almost Common Value Auctions PDF Author: Susan L. Rose
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Auctions
Languages : en
Pages : 88

Get Book Here

Book Description
Abstract: In a common value auction, the value of the object for sale is the same to all bidders. In an almost common value auction, one bidder, the advantaged bidder, values the object slightly more than the other, regular bidders. With only two bidders, a slight advantage is predicted to have an explosive effect on the outcome and revenue of an auction. The advantaged bidder always wins and revenue decreases dramatically relative to the pure common value auction. Ascending auctions, which reduce to two bidders, are thought to be particularly vulnerable to the explosive effect, which may discourage entry. My dissertation investigates the explosive effect in experimental English clock auctions. The first essay, "An Experimental Investigation of the Explosive Effect in Almost Common Value Auctions," uses a two-bidder wallet game to test these predictions. I find the effect of an advantage to be proportional, not explosive, confirming past studies. I develop a behavioral model that predicts the proportional effect and test it against the data. The model has two types of bidders: naïve and sophisticated. Naïve bidders use a rule of thumb bidding function while sophisticated bidders are fully rational and account for the probability that a rival is naïve or sophisticated when best responding. I was able to classify subjects as naïve or sophisticated, and those classified as sophisticated do have a better understanding of the game. However, all subjects suffered from the winner's curse, which may have masked the explosive effect and been exacerbated by the structure of the wallet game. The second essay, "Bidding in Almost Common Value Auctions: An Experiment," moves the analysis to a four bidder auction to directly test the entry predictions. I used a more intuitive common value structure and controlled for the winner's curse by using subjects with prior experience in common value auctions. I found that although subjects did not suffer from the winner's curse, there is no evidence of an explosive effect. Advantaged bidders won no more auctions than predicted by chance. Entry and auction revenue were unaffected by the presence of advantaged bidders.

Common Value Auctions and the Winner's Curse

Common Value Auctions and the Winner's Curse PDF Author: John H. Kagel
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691218951
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 419

Get Book Here

Book Description
An invaluable account of how auctions work—and how to make them work Few forms of market exchange intrigue economists as do auctions, whose theoretical and practical implications are enormous. John Kagel and Dan Levin, complementing their own distinguished research with papers written with other specialists, provide a new focus on common value auctions and the "winner's curse." In such auctions the value of each item is about the same to all bidders, but different bidders have different information about the underlying value. Virtually all auctions have a common value element; among the burgeoning modern-day examples are those organized by Internet companies such as eBay. Winners end up cursing when they realize that they won because their estimates were overly optimistic, which led them to bid too much and lose money as a result. The authors first unveil a fresh survey of experimental data on the winner's curse. Melding theory with the econometric analysis of field data, they assess the design of government auctions, such as the spectrum rights (air wave) auctions that continue to be conducted around the world. The remaining chapters gauge the impact on sellers' revenue of the type of auction used and of inside information, show how bidders learn to avoid the winner's curse, and present comparisons of sophisticated bidders with college sophomores, the usual guinea pigs used in laboratory experiments. Appendixes refine theoretical arguments and, in some cases, present entirely new data. This book is an invaluable, impeccably up-to-date resource on how auctions work--and how to make them work.

Essays in the Empirical Analysis of Auction Markets

Essays in the Empirical Analysis of Auction Markets PDF Author: Ali Hortaçsu
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 390

Get Book Here

Book Description


Almost Common Value Auctions

Almost Common Value Auctions PDF Author: Paul Klemperer
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Auktionstheorie / Übernahme / Fusion / Theorie
Languages : en
Pages : 16

Get Book Here

Book Description


Almost Common Value Auctions

Almost Common Value Auctions PDF Author: Susan L. Rose
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
In almost common value auctions one bidder has a higher (private) value for the item than the other bidders. Theory predicts that even a small private value advantage can have an explosive effect in English auctions, with advantaged bidders always winning and sharp decreases in revenue. These predictions fail to materialize for experienced bidders who have learned to avoid the worst effects of the winner's curse. Bidding is better characterized as proportional, with advantaged bidders tending to bid as in a pure common value auction after adding their private value advantage to their estimated value of the item.

The Handbook of Experimental Economics, Volume 2

The Handbook of Experimental Economics, Volume 2 PDF Author: John H. Kagel
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691139997
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 770

Get Book Here

Book Description
An indispensable survey of new developments and results in experimental economics When The Handbook of Experimental Economics first came out in 1995, the notion of economists conducting lab experiments to generate data was relatively new. Since then, the field has exploded. This second volume of the Handbook covers some of the most exciting new growth areas in experimental economics, presents the latest results and experimental methods, and identifies promising new directions for future research. Featuring contributions by leading practitioners, the Handbook describes experiments in macroeconomics, charitable giving, neuroeconomics, other-regarding preferences, market design, political economy, subject population effects, gender effects, auctions, and learning and the economics of small decisions. Contributors focus on key developments and report on experiments, highlighting the dialogue between experimenters and theorists. While most of the experiments consist of laboratory studies, the book also includes several chapters that report extensively on field experiments related to the subject area studied. Covers exciting new growth areas in experimental economics Features contributions by leading experts Describes experiments in macroeconomics, charitable giving, neuroeconomics, market design, political economy, gender effects, auctions, and more Highlights the dialogue by experimenters with theorists and each other Includes several chapters covering field experiments related to the subject area studied

Case Concerning the Delimitation of the Maritime Boundary in the Gulf of Maine Area

Case Concerning the Delimitation of the Maritime Boundary in the Gulf of Maine Area PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description


Three Essays in Empirical Auctions

Three Essays in Empirical Auctions PDF Author: Sudip Gupta
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 148

Get Book Here

Book Description


Essays on Value Distributions in All-pay Auctions

Essays on Value Distributions in All-pay Auctions PDF Author: Suat Akbulut
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description
This dissertation consists of three chapters. The first chapter studies the value distribution adoption choice of a player when she competes against an incumbent in an all-pay auction setting. The second chapter analyzes how much would a player like to learn about her own valuation in a similar setting. Lastly, the third chapter analyzes the best information disclosure policy that an auctioneer can adopt according to different performance measures in a two-player two-stage all-pay auction setting, where the players choose their value distributions in the first stage. The first chapter considers a two-player all-pay auction setting and modifies it by adding a technology-adoption stage at the beginning of the game. In a discrete valuations environment, assuming one player's valuation is common knowledge, we allow the other player (informed) to pick a distribution over the valuation space. Her opponent (uninformed) observes her choice of distribution. However, her valuation is privately drawn according to this distribution. The two players then play an asymmetric all-pay auction. We show that in such a setting, the informed player adopts a distribution that assigns positive probabilities to at most two elements; that will always contain the supremum, and sometimes, the infimum of the set of available values. She pools the extreme values in order to create an information asymmetry, which then would make the uninformed player bid less aggressively. We later impose a mean condition on the distribution that the informed player could pick and observe that she still prefers to split the probability mass on in-between values to the extreme ones. As a result, she picks the same support but arranges the probability mass on these values to meet the mean condition. In other words, the informed player is first interested in including only the extreme values in the support of her value distribution, and then the probabilities assigned to those values. The second chapter assumes that the informed player's value distribution is common knowledge and that she cannot observe her realized value. However, she can acquire additional information about her realized value by adopting a learning experiment. She picks such an experiment in the first stage. Even though her choice of experiment is observed by the uninformed player, she privately learns the realization of the experiment. Then, they play an all-pay auction in the second stage of the game. Every learning experiment induces a posterior probability distribution over the convex hull of the set of available values. The informed player bids as if her value is drawn from this posterior distribution, where she privately observes her value. Therefore, her problem boils down to choosing a posterior distribution that stochastically dominates the prior in the second-order sense. We show that the informed player's motivation to split the probability mass on in-between types to the extreme types is still present. However, due to the distributional constraints, she will pick a fully informative experiment to learn her value as long as it does not result in her two lowest values bidding zero with a positive probability in the equilibrium of the all-pay auction stage. If that is the case, she would try to mimic the prior distribution for the high types, who will never bid zero, and allocate the remaining probability to only one type to meet the constraint. One natural extension of our analysis is studying the equilibrium value distribution profiles when both players are choosing their own value distribution. When the possible values are only high and low, we show that the profile in which one player picks the high value with probability one while the other player assigns probability half to each values is the unique (up to symmetry) value distribution profile. Moreover, when we consider any set of values, we show that the profile in which one player picks the highest value with probability one, while the other player assigns probability half to the highest and the lowest values each is an equilibrium value distribution profile. Due to the lack of an analytical approach to the equilibrium bidding distributions of the all-pay auctions in an asymmetric information environment, checking whether this equilibrium is unique is left as future work. The last chapter analyzes the best information disclosure policy that an auctioneer can adopt according to different performance measures, namely players' payoff, prize allocation efficiency, and aggregate effort. The significant contribution of the analysis is that players have the ability to choose the distribution from which their own types are drawn. Using a two-player all-pay auction with the two-type setting, we show that the optimal disclosure policy depends on the ratio of the value of winning for a low type to the value of winning for a high type.

Almost Common Value Auctions and Discontinuous Equilibria

Almost Common Value Auctions and Discontinuous Equilibria PDF Author: Gisèle Umbhauer
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description
In almost common value auctions, even a very small private payoff advantage is usually supposed to have an explosive effect on the outcomes in a second-price sealed-bid common value auction. According to Bikhchandani (1988) and Klemperer (1998) the large set of equilibria obtained for common value auction games drastically shrinks, so that the advantaged player always wins the auction, at a price that sharply decreases the seller's payoff. Yet this result has not been observed experimentally. In this paper, we show that Bikhchandani's equilibria are not the only equilibria of the game. By allowing bids to not continuously depend on private information, we establish a new family of perfect equilibria with nice properties: (i) the advantaged bidder does no longer win the auction regardless of her private information, (ii) she may pay a much higher price than in Bikhchandani's equilibria, (iii) there is no ex-post regret for both the winner and the looser, and (iv) the equilibria give partial support to some naïve behaviour observed experimentally. Moreover the intersection between these equilibria, level-k reasoning and cursed equilibria is not empty.