Download or read book Essays on Structural Analysis of Procurement Auctions written by Bin Yu and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation addresses the empirical analysis of procurements based on the auction theory, which is known as the structural-form analysis of procurement auctions.

Download or read book Three Essays on Multi round Procurement Auctions written by Lu Ji and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My dissertation contributes to auction studies. It analyzes the bidding behavior in multi-round auctions. It is motivated by an interesting multi-round feature observed in the procurement auctions held by the Indiana Department of Transportation (INDOT hereafter), which adopts secret reserve prices. Prior research has indicated that auctions with reserve prices usually lead to no trade. However, prior research has not paid much attention to the possibility that the seller can auction unsold objects from previous rounds and a trade is therefore still likely to occur. My dissertation provides new theoretical and empirical analyses of auctions with multiple rounds. It first develops a game-theoretic bidding model for the multi-round auctions with non-forward looking bidders. It then establishes a structural econometric model in order to conduct a structural analysis of the INDOT data. Lastly it introduces dynamic features into the model by assuming that bidders are forward looking and uses a dynamic control approach to analyze the bidding behavior and policy issues. The main findings are: (1) rational bidders reduce their markup across periods in multi-round auctions; (2) simulations show that using secret reserve price is sometimes better than public reserve price for the procurement auctioneer; (3) counterfactual analyses indicate that on one hand, when bidders are not forward looking, it is better for the INDOT to use a secret reserve price; on the other hand, when bidders are forward looking, it is better for the INDOT to use a secret reserve price when the discount factor is low and to use a public reserve price when the discount factor is sufficiently high.

Download or read book Essays on the Structural Analysis of Selection and Search written by Matthew Loren Gentry and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 123 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in auctions and procurement written by George M. Deltas and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on the Structural Analysis of Auction Markets written by Marleen Renske Marra and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis presents new results that make significant contributions to the structural analysis of auction markets. One chapter develops a methodology to study welfare and revenue impacts of fees in auction platforms. The impacts of fees are theoretically ambiguous as the platform faces a ``two-sided market'' with network effects; increased seller entry raises its value to bidders, and vice versa. The chapter develops and solves a structural model with endogenous bidder and seller entry, seller selection, and costly listing inspection. It also exploits an original dataset with 15 months of wine auctions to study these issues. Relevant model primitives are shown to be identified in the auction platform model from observed variation in reserve prices, transaction prices, and the number of bidders. The proposed estimation strategy combines methods from the auction and discrete choice literatures. Model estimates reveal significant network effects, and it is shown with counterfactual policy simulations that fee structures that subsidize bidders make all parties better off. Implications for competition policy are discussed as well. Another chapter focuses on nonparametric identification in English auctions with absentee bidding, in which the number of bidders is unknown. The chapter exploits additional identifying variation from drop-out values of absentee bidders and develops a novel nonparametric identification approach based on the stochastic spacing of order statistics. In combination with a shape restriction the method delivers bounds on both the latent valuation distribution and expected consumer surplus. The value of the proposed method is highlighted by showing that it identifies informative bounds on policy-relevant model primitives in a sample of traditional English auctions collected from the online bidding portal of Sotheby's, which does not contain the number of bidders and their final bids. The thesis ends by providing directions for future research.

Download or read book Essays on the Structural Analysis of Auctions written by Ying Zheng and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Procurement Auctions written by Hidenori Takahashi and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Honor of Cheng Hsiao written by Dek Terrell and published by Emerald Group Publishing. This book was released on 2020-04-15 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Including contributions spanning a variety of theoretical and applied topics in econometrics, this volume of Advances in Econometrics is published in honour of Cheng Hsiao.

Download or read book Essays on the Design of Procurement Auctions written by In-Gyu Kim and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Procurement Scoring Auction and Quality Manipulation Corruption written by Yangguang Huang and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 115 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation studies the procurement problem with focus on the issue of quality. Most target items of procurement are not standardized goods, but are some customized goods with quality measured by non-monetary attributes. Scoring auction is one of the most popular procurement schemes used in practice. In a scoring auction, each supplying firm chooses its bid as a combination of price and quality attributes according to a pre-announced scoring rule. The scoring rule ranks all submitted multi-dimensional bids and award the contract to the firm with highest score. To implement a scoring auction, quality assessment is necessary, but the buyer usually does not possess the relevant industrial expertise. So the buyer has to hire an intermediary agent and the problem of quality manipulation arises when the quality reports of bids are distorted by the agent. In particular, the agent may exaggerate the corrupted firm's quality score in exchange for bribe. Chapter 1 provides an theoretical analysis on the optimal procurement scheme design problem under quality manipulation. Chapter 2 is an empirical study on scoring auctions. Chapter 3 shows how we can statistically test quality manipulation from scoring auction data.

Download or read book Essays in Industrial Organization Entry in Multi Object Auctions and Freemium Packages in Two sided Markets written by Renato Zaterka Giroldo and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 127 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first two chapters of this dissertation, I study the design of multi-object auctions. Using a large data set from the Brazilian public procurement sector, I show evidence that entry is costly and that the mix of products being auctioned off is a first-order effect to understand firm participation. In the first chapter, I find evidence that the data is consistent with a theory of selection. The average entrant has a higher product match with the session, and they are closer to auction locations. Distance affects entry decisions negatively: a 1 unit (100km) increase in the distance to the auction location lowers the odds ratio for entry 0.91 times. At the same time, an additional auction in the set of potential auctions of a firm increases the odds for entry 1.62 times. In terms of variable costs, a 1% increase in the distance to the auction location increases bid by 0.4% to 3.3%. There are also gains of scale in terms of the size of the contracts: a 1% increase in the contract quantity for a given product increases bids by 0.64% to 0.76%. The main force responsible for lowering procurement costs is the presence of additional bidders. I find that an extra bidder can lower costs between 21.2% and 32.4%. These results motivate and feed into the structural model presented in chapter 2. In the second chapter, I continue to analyze this market with the focus on estimating entry costs and answering policy questions. To do so, I build a novel model of endogenous entry in multi-object auction sessions that allows me to disentangle two forces that affect entry decisions: entry costs, and the menu of items of a given session. The model has two stages. In the first stage, firms decide whether to enter an auction session and pay a fixed cost after observing an imperfect signal of their true cost. In the second stage, both the items for which they can bid and their costs are realized, and the auction takes place. I focus the analysis on type symmetric equilibria, where bidders of the same type follow the same entry strategy. In equilibrium, marginal bidders make zero profits. This condition allows me to link the unobserved entry costs to the observed bid behavior of entrants. Having derived the equilibrium of the model, I estimate model fundamentals and turn to policy questions. The estimates provide evidence that entry is more attractive to local firms. I find that their cost distribution stochastically dominates the one from non-local firms. Moreover, conditioned on the number of items a firm can participate in, non-local firms face between 3.9% to 6.5% higher entry costs than local firms. I focus on two counterfactual simulations. In the fully efficient scenario, where firms do not incur any entry costs, I find that procurement costs would be lowered by 22.5% to 40.1%. These are bounds on the maximum cost savings and also quantifies the degree of inefficiency present in this market. The second counterfactual is a partially efficient scenario, where non-local firms face the same entry costs as local firms. This analysis focuses on a selected equilibrium where firms enter the sessions sequentially. Firms are sorted according to a lexicographic order which is determined by the strength of their signal, number of items, and firm type (non-local/local). I find that procurement costs would be lowered by 2.8% to 2.9%. Thus, on this type of equilibrium and by holding on-site auctions, the government indirectly sacrificed some efficiency to the benefit of local firms. In the third chapter, I study the pricing of platforms that offer consumers the choice between a free package, in which consumers are exposed to advertising, and a premium package, in which they pay to not be exposed to advertisements. I characterize its profit-maximizing and Pigouvian pricing, which allows me to analyze the degree to which the platform incorporates consumers' distaste for advertising in its pricing scheme, as well as the trade-offs that emerge between the free and paid packages. The results contribute to the discussion of consumers' overexposure to advertising when platforms behave as a social planner and maximize their value.

Download or read book Dissertation Abstracts International written by and published by . This book was released on 2009-04 with total page 564 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Auctions Contests and Games written by Vivek Bhattacharya and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis consists of three chapters broadly in industrial organization, with a focus on contests and auctions, and game theory. Chapter 1 develops a new model of multistage R&D procurement contests, in which firms conduct research over a number of stages to develop an innovative product and then supply it to a procurer. I show that the primitives of this model-the cost of research, the distributions of project values and delivery costs, and the share of the profits captured by the firms-are non parametrically identified given data on R&D expenditures and procurement contract amounts. I then develop a tractable estimation procedure and apply it to data from the Small Business Innovation Research program in the Department of Defense. I find that within a particular contests, there is low variation in the values of the proposed projects, which are drawn early in the process, but considerably larger variation in the delivery costs, which are drawn later. The DOD provides high-powered incentives, sharing about 75% of the surplus with the firms. I then suggest simple design changes to improve social surplus but find that many of these socially beneficial design changes would in fact reduce DOD profits. Chapter 2, which is joint with James Roberts and Andrew Sweeting, studies the benefits of regulating entry into procurement auctions, relative to standard auctions in which bidders are allowed to enter and bid freely. Specifically, we study the relationship between auction outcomes and the precision of information bidders have about their costs before entering the bidding stage of the contest. We show that the relative performance of a standard auction with free entry and an "entry rights auction," which restricts participation in the bidding phase, depends non monotonically on the information precision. We finally estimate the model on a dataset of auctions for bridge-building contracts let by the Oklahoma and Texas Departments of Transportation. Entry is estimated to be moderately selective, and the counterfactual implication is that an entry rights auction would significantly increase social efficiency and reduce procurement costs. Chapter 3, which is joint with Lucas Manuelli and Ludwig Straub, proposes a model of "signal distortion" in a game with imperfect public monitoring. We construct a framework in which each player has the chance to distort the true public signal, and each player is uncertain about the distortion technologies available to his opponent. Continuation payoffs are dependent on the distorted signal. Our main result is that when players evaluate strategies according to their worst case guarantees-i.e., are ambiguity-averse over certain distributions in the environment-players behave as if the continuation payoffs that incentivize them in the stage game are perfectly aligned with their opponents'. We then provide two examples showing counterintuitive implications of this result: (i) signal structures that allow players to identify deviators can be harmful in enforcing a strategy profile, and (ii) the presence of signal distortion can help sustain cooperation when it is impossible in standard settings. We then extend our equilibrium concept to a repeated game, show that it is a natural generalization of strongly symmetric equilibria, and then prove an anti-folk theorem that payoffs are in general bounded away from efficiency.

Download or read book An Investigation Into the Design of Procurement Auctions written by Wei-Shiun Chang and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 103 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ABSTRACT: This dissertation examines a variety of mechanism designs adopted by industry to resolve two problematic issues in procurement auctions. Laboratory experiments are utilized to test theoretical predictions. The first essay investigates procurement auctions in a private value environment where procured goods are differentiated by unobservable characteristics. When unobservable characteristics are not taken into account in the selection process, the outcome of a procurement auction likely deviate from the buyer's optimal outcome. Three commonly used mechanisms are considered, namely standard second price auction, performance based contracting and pseudo quality screening. Bidders internalize unobservable characteristics into their bids and systematically transfer the equivalent value of those characteristics to buyers in the procurement auctions with performance based contracting. Subjects bid at their costs as predicted in the procurement auctions with pseudo quality screening and the price only mechanisms while they bid closely to their net costs in the auction with performance based contract. Experimental data has shown that the performance based contract mechanism generates higher buyer revenue than other two mechanisms do. The second essay is a test of a mechanism, average bid, used to resolve the winner's curse in a common value environment. Bidders' behavior in this mechanism is not significantly different from that in a conventional mechanism, low price. Consequently, price in the average bid mechanism is driven up and there is a reduction in the frequency of negative earnings and bankruptcy.

Download or read book Essays on Multi item Auctions written by Rao Fu and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this dissertation, I explore bidders' behavior in multiple auctions which are conducted sequentially or simultaneously. The first and the second chapters examine buyers' bidding behaviors in an environment of multiple simultaneous auctions and show that the wildly-used assumption of proxy bidding is inappropriate in the multiple auction setting. The first chapter proposes two models which try to describe online auction platforms. One model has a fixed ending time and the other does not. I show that incremental bidding strategy can arise out of equilibrium and weakly dominate the proxy bidding strategy. Late bidding is also discussed. I use the data I collect from eBay to test these theoretical predictions in the second chapter. The estimation results basically support the theory part. Incremental bidders who switch among different auctions are more likely to win and have higher payoffs than proxy bidders. The third essay studies the procurement auctions in the Texas school milk market. I define score functions to map the bids from multiple dimensions to one dimension and analyze the factors that may affect the bids of school milk suppliers. After considering the impacts of these factors including backlogs and cost synergies, I can still find some evidences for existence of collusion among the bidders.

Download or read book Essays in Empirical Industrial Organization and Auctions written by Shumpei Goke and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this dissertation, I investigate various aspects of auction design problems. In Chapter 1, I study secret reserve prices in auctions that are partially binding in the sense that the sellers can accept bids below them. Such a reserve price has a bite only when the winning bid exceeds it, in which case the winning bid is accepted without seller's action. This work investigates the motivation for this puzzling practice that many real-world auctions take, such as wholesale used-car auctions. I estimate a structural model of ascending auctions using the auction data in the wholesale used-car market. To microfound seller's decision of the secret reserve price, I posit that the seller has uncertainty as to the value of the item when she sets the reserve price and that this uncertainty is resolved after she observes the auction price. I compare the status quo with two counterfactual auction formats: (i) no reserve prices and the seller gets to accept or reject every winning bid, and (ii) the seller commits to the secret reserve price. I observe very little difference among them in terms of probability of trade, seller's payoff and revenue. I discuss how the current format may be rationalized as reducing transaction costs for asking sellers' confirmation of all winning bids and avoiding sellers' cognitive cost of committing to a reserve price. The work in Chapter 2 is a joint work with Gabriel Y. Weintraub, Ralph A. Mastromonaco, and Samuel S. Seljan. Weintraub and I formulated the research questions and laid out steps for the research project in close collaboration, and I performed all the data analysis with the advice from Weintraub. Mastromonaco and Seljan provided Weintraub and me with the dataset and the necessary domain knowledge. In this work, we study actual bidding behavior when a new auction format gets introduced into the marketplace. More specifically, we investigate this question using a novel dataset on internet display advertising auctions and exploiting a staggered adoption by different publishers (sellers) of first-price auctions (FPAs), instead of the traditional second-price auctions (SPAs). Event study regression estimates indicate that, immediately after the auction format change, the revenue per sold impression (price) jumped considerably for the treated publishers relative to the control publishers, ranging from 35% to 75% of the pre-treatment price level of the treatment group. Further, we observe that in later auction format changes the increase in the price levels under FPAs relative to price levels under SPAs dissipates over time, reminiscent of the celebrated revenue equivalence theorem. We take this as evidence of initially insufficient bid shading after the format change rather than an immediate shift to a new Bayesian Nash equilibrium. Prices then went down as bidders learned to shade their bids. We also show that bidders' sophistication impacted their response to the auction format change. Our work constitutes one of the first field studies on bidders' responses to auction format changes, providing an important complement to theoretical model predictions. As such, it provides valuable information to auction designers when considering the implementation of different formats. In Chapter 3, I study the efficient design of mortgage foreclosure auctions. Lenders with delinquent mortgages recover their lending by foreclosure, which is a legal process to sell the mortgage property via public auction. In the U.S., mortgage lenders are allowed to bid in such foreclosure auctions, and they win in such auctions very frequently. I study the question of why mortgage lenders win in most of those auctions. I develop a theoretical model of ascending auctions with private values. I find that the lender's optimal bidding strategy is the same as the optimal reserve price of an auction seller, if it is below the debt balance. In other words, the lender exercises monopoly power as would an auction seller, up to the remaining debt. This increases the probability that the lender wins the auction, as third-party bidders' optimal strategy is to drop out of the auction when the price reaches their respective valuations of the mortgage property. The monopoly power that the mortgage confers to the lender also implies that the resulting allocation of the mortgage property may be inefficient. To resolve such inefficiency, I derive a mechanism that achieves efficient allocation of the foreclosed property.

Download or read book Essays in Honor of Jerry Hausman written by Badi H. Baltagi and published by Emerald Group Publishing. This book was released on 2012-12-17 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aims to annually publish original scholarly econometrics papers on designated topics with the intention of expanding the use of developed and emerging econometric techniques by disseminating ideas on the theory and practice of econometrics throughout the empirical economic, business and social science literature.