Download or read book Essays on the Empirical Analysis of Auctions written by Bjarne Brendstrup and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in the Empirical Analysis of Auction Markets written by Ali Hortaçsu and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in the Empirical Analysis of Selling Mechanisms written by Caio Waisman and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation empirically investigates the performance of different selling mechanisms. The first chapter addresses the tradeoff between auctions ans posted prices in the context of a scarce perishable good. It makes use of data on National Football League tickets offered at eBay and leverages the within-seller and within-product variation in mechanism choice to estimate a dynamic structural model in which heterogeneous, forward-looking sellers optimally choose between the different mechanisms and their features. Counterfactual results suggest that sellers would experience an average 87.75% decrease in expected revenues if auctions were removed and an almost 13% decrease if posted prices were. In turn, consumers would benefit from an auction-only platform since the expected number of transactions would increase and expected transaction prices would decrease. The second chapter is co-authored with Dom Coey, Brad Larsen, and Kane Sweeney and it focuses on online auctions. In particular, the majority of these auctions are effectively second-price auctions, which implies that to implement the optimal mechanism the seller's problem boils down to choosing the optimal reserve price. Hence, we propose a set of estimators to discover what the optimal reserve price should be and which remain valid under general conditions. We establish the asymptotic properties of these estimators, propose a learning policy for sellers who run absolute auctions to gather data to estimate what reserve price they should use, and illustrate our tools using data from eBay on smartphones. Finally, we also discuss how the approach we propose can be extended to explicitly account for asymmetric bidders and implement the Myerson (1981) optimal auction. The final chapter is also co-authored with Dom Coey, Brad Larsen, and Kane Sweeney. It addresses the empirical analysis of ascending auctions, which is often complicated by severe data restrictions. In particular, we extend the methodology proposed by Aradillas-López et al. (2013) by first proving it remains valid under bidder asymmetries even when the identities of bidders are not observed and then by showing how this information, when available, can be used to improve upon existing tools. We demonstrate the advantages of this approach using USFS timber auctions.

Download or read book Three Essays on All pay Auctions written by Minbo Xu and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The dissertation includes three research papers on all-pay auctions. The first paper (Chapter 1) considers an all-pay auction for a product in which there is an option for bidders to guarantee purchases at a seller specified posted price P at any time. We find the symmetric pure-strategy equilibria in the first- and second-price all-pay auctions (also called war of attrition) with a buy-price option. Under these equilibria the buy-price option will affect high-value bidders' behavior, and improve their welfare. At the same time, the seller can select the optimal posted price to collect more revenue, and the Revenue Equivalence Theorem holds as well. The second paper (Chapter 2) conducts empirical analysis on online penny auctions, which are seen as an adaptation of the famous dollar auction and as "the evil stepchild of game theory and behavioral economics." We use the complete bid and bidder history at a website to study if penny auctions can sustain excessive profits over time. The overwhelming majority of new bidders lose money, but they quit quickly. A very small percentage of bidders are experienced and strategically sophisticated, but they earn substantial profits. Our evidence thus suggests that penny auctions cannot sustain excessive profits without attracting a revolving door of new customers who will lose money. The third paper (Chapter 3) proposes a nonparametric estimation approach to empirical analysis of the war of attrition. In order to construct a tractable model, we consider the uncertain competition and derive a structural model with a stochastic number of bidders. We admit the contamination from observables and introduce a deconvolution problem with heteroscedastic errors into the nonparametric approach. By a two-step nonparametric procedure, we can attain a consistent estimator of the distribution of bidders' private values from the observables. Finally, we apply the estimation procedure to field data from penny auctions.

Download or read book Empirical Essays on the Efficiency of Heterogeneous Good Auction written by Thomas A. Martin (IV.) and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A recent pursuit of the auction design literature has been the development of an auction mechanism which performs well in a multi-good setting, when the goods are not substitutes. This work began in earnest with the Federal Communications Commission spectrum license auctions in the early nineties and continues to this day. In a setting in which goods are not substitutes, the value of one good depends non-negatively on the quantities of other goods that are won. This type of interdependent value structure has proven difficult to account for in auction design. However, the need for mechanisms that account for such a value structure hinges on the magnitude of the interdependence, whose computation is an empirical exercise. I identify a setting in which to perform this computation. I develop an empirical methodology that allows me to recover bidders' value functions in a multi-good auction setting. This methodology allows me to assess the magnitude of any interdependence in the goods? value structure. Since the auction setting that I analyze is a variation of the standard uniform price auction, which has been adapted for a multi-good setting, I am able to measure the benefit of having a direct revelation mechanism. This counterfactual study is performed by maximizing the value of the auction using the recovered bidder value functions. I find evidence that there is an interdependent value structure in the setting. The counterfactual auction finds that the standard uniform price auction, adapted to a multi-good setting, performs poorly in the presence of such a value structure. The setting for this analysis is an auction for financial transmission rights held in Texas in 2002. The auction involved twenty two firms and collected almost $70 million in revenue. This research is the first to empirically assess efficiency in this type of auction setting.

Download or read book Three Essays in Empirical Auctions written by Sudip Gupta and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

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 Empirical Inference for Online Auctions written by Guojie Wang and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 69 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three essays. The first essay adopts the survival analysis to empirically analyze a new auction format, pay-per-bid auction, in which a fee occurs to the bidder when a new bid is submitted. This auction mechanism attracted many theoretical studies and empirical testing in recent years. However, analyzing the pay-per-bid auction under the survival framework provides a novel path to reflect this new auction format as well as involved bidder and seller behaviors. By considering the arrival of bids as a necessary condition for a pay-per-bid auction to survive, survival analysis tools such as Kaplan-Meier (KM) estimate and Accelerated Failure Time (AFT) models are applied to the data set collected from a leading pay-per-bid auction site Swoopo. Cox Proportional Hazard (PH) model is also discussed. Some equilibrium behaviors are confirmed but also some equilibrium deviated behaviors are detected. The second essay models the last-minute bidding behaviors in eBay's hard close auction design using non-parametric analysis. For comparison purpose, the auctions in Amazon with soft close auction design are combined to carry out analysis. The data is selected from eBay and Amazon and a large difference in bid timing is found between auction sites. Density estimation of bid timing confirms the existence of such difference. Mixed additive model is applied to explore the nonparametric relationship between bid timing and parameters of bidding environment. And generalized response model with logistic link function is used to model the probability of a late bidding occurs conditioned on interested covariates. The third essay proposes, from a non-parametric Bayesian aspect, using Dirichlet Processes (DP) with normal mixtures to estimate underlying valuations in second-price ascending auctions under the independent-private-values paradigm. I illustrate how a second-price ascending auction is similar in mechanism to its sealed counterpart and consequently bidders' valuations can be extracted if bidders are identifiable. Compared to classical methods, to provide more flexible and reliable inferences, DP density estimation is strongly motivated and represents an advance. As a non-parametric Bayesian method, DP can accommodate non-nomality through normal mixtures and develop Bayesian inference on model parameters. Due to the complex nature of posteriors, MCMC simulation is used to approximate posteriors as well as density predictions. To test the validity of this method, a Monte Carlo experiment is conducted with similar sample size to our eBay data. In the last section, I reanalyze a data set from eBay auctions and apply our method to estimate the valuations.

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 Online Auctions written by Yu Zhang and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation, which consists of three essays, studies online auctions both theoretically and empirically. The first essay studies a special online auction format used by eBay, "Buy-It- Now" (BIN) auctions, in which bidders are allowed to buy the item at a fixed BIN price set by the seller and end the auction immediately. I construct a two-stage model in which the BIN price is only available to one group of bidders. I find that bidders cutoff is lower in this model, which means, bidders are more likely to accept the BIN option, compared with the models assuming all bidders are offered the BIN. The results explain the high frequency of bidders accepting BIN price, and may also help explain the popularity of temporary BIN auctions in online auction sites, such as eBay, where BIN option is only offered to early bidders. In the second essay, I study how bidders' risk attitude and time preference affect their behavior in Buy-It-Now auctions. I consider two cases, when both bidders enter the auction at the same time (homogenous bidders) thus BIN option is offered to both of them, and when two bidders enter the auction at two different stages (heterogenous bidders) thus the BIN option is only offered to the early bidder. Bidders' optimal strategies are derived explicitly in both cases. In particular, given bidders' risk attitude and time preference, the cutoff valuation, such that a bidder will accept BIN if his valuation is higher than the cutoff valuation and reject it otherwise, is calculated. I find that the cutoff valuation in the case of heterogenous bidders is lower than that in the case of homogenous bidders. The third essay focuses on the empirical modeling of the price processes of online auctions. I generalize the monotone series estimator to model the pooled price processes. Then I apply the model and the estimator to eBay auction data of a palm PDA. The results are shown to capture closely the overall pattern of observed price dynamics. In particular, early bidding, mid-auction draught, and sniping are well approximated by the estimated price curve.

Download or read book Essays on Empirical Analysis of Multi unit Auctions Impacts of Financial Transmission Rights on the Restructured Electricity Industry written by Hailing Zang and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation uses recently developed empirical methodologies for the study of multi-unit auctions to test the impacts of Financial Transmission Rights (FTRs) on the competitiveness of restructured electricity markets. FTRs are a special type of financial option that hedge against volatility in the cost of transporting electricity over the grid. Policy makers seek to use the prices of FTRs as market signals to incentivize efficient investment and utilization of transmission capacity. However, prices will not send the correct signals if market participants strategically use FTRs. This dissertation uses data from the Texas electricity market to test whether the prices of FTRs are efficient to achieve such goals. The auctions studied are multiunit, uniform-price, sealed-bid auctions. The first part of the dissertation studies the auctions on the spot market of the wholesale electricity industry. I derive structural empirical models to test theoretical predictions as to whether bidders fully internalize the effect of FTRs on profits into their bidding decisions. I find that bidders are learning as to how to optimally bid above marginal cost for their inframarginal capacities. The bidders also learn to bid to include FTRs into their profit maximization problem during the course of the first year. But starting from the second year, they deviated from optimal bidding that includes FTRs in the profit maximization problems. Counterfactual analysis show that the primary effect of FTRs on market outcomes is changing the level of prices rather than production efficiency. Finally, I find that in most months, the current allocations of FTRs are statistically equivalent to the optimal allocations. The second part of the dissertation studies the bidding behavior in the FTR auctions. I find that FTRs' strategic impact on the FTR purchasing behavior is significant for large bidders - firms exercising market power in the FTR auctions. Second, trader forecasts future FTR credit very accurately while large generators' forecasts of future FTR credit tends to be biased upward. Finally, The bid shading patterns are consistent with theoretical predictions and support the existence of common values.

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 on Empirical Auctions and Related Econometrics written by and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first chapter studies identification and estimation of first-price auctions if the bidders face ambiguity about the distribution of valuations. Ambiguity is modeled using Gilboa and Schmeidler's (1989) Maxmin Expected Utility preferences. We exploit variation in the number of bidders to identify the essential primitives of the model. The identification result yields a closed form for the inverse bid function, which suggests a two-step estimation procedure. We study asymptotic and finite sample properties of the estimators. We find evidence of ambiguity in USFS timber auctions which leads to aggressive bidding for bidders with high valuations and has important implications for auction design. The second chapter proposes a procedure to test restrictions on infinite-dimensional parameters (partially) identified by unconditional or conditional moment equalities. Our new method allows us to test restrictions involving a continuum of inequalities. Examples of such restrictions include weakly increasing, concavity and first-order stochastic dominance. We show that our testing procedure controls size uniformly and has power approaching 1 against fixed alternatives. We conduct Monte Carlo Experiments to study the finite sample properties of our procedure. The third chapter studies the inference problem of bidders' risk attitudes in Independent Private Value (IPV) first-price auctions with multiplicative auction-level unobserved heterogeneity. Bidders are assumed to have Constant Relative Risk Aversion. Under the exclusion restriction that bidders randomly select themselves into auctions given the auction-level unobserved heterogeneity, bidders' CRRA coefficient is point-identified from bid data of auctions with at least two different number of active bidders. Our exclusion restriction is consistent with a variety of models with endogenous entry. Empirical application to USFS timber auctions shows that we will conclude that timber firms are risk averse if we ignoring the unobserved heterogeneity. But once we take the unobserved heterogeneity into account, risk neutrality is consistent with the data.

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 on Theoretical and Empirical Auctions written by Octavian Cărare and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

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 Bidding Behaviour in Multi Unit Auctions written by Rebecca Catherine Elskamp and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis contains three essays on the topic of bidding behaviour in multi-unit auctions. The first essay develops and experimentally tests multi-unit auction theory to identify the effects of "scaling up" multi-unit auction environments on individual bidding behaviour. A uniquely tractable environment is developed that leads to the construction of uniform auctions of different scales, where the prediction is that risk neutral bidders' bids on the last unit they demand are independent of scale. Two main effects were observed in the experimental data. Regardless of scale, bidders were found to bid more aggressively than predicted by the theory. Secondly, small scale effects were observed, as bids were more aggressive in the small scale relative to the larger scale treatment. The theoretical consequences of risk aversion, joy of winning, and anticipated regret are analyzed to explain these deviations from predictions. The second essay provides empirical evidence on how economic agents converge to optimality. Learning direction theory is applied to bidding behaviour from the Ontario dairy quota auction, following a change in pricing rule from uniform to discriminatory. Two dimensions of bidding behaviour are examined at the individual bidder level, bid prices and number of price-quantity bid pairs. Adjustments in bidding behaviour are broadly consistent with the ex-post rationality. Experience acquired under the discriminatory pricing rule is found to have diminishing effects on adjustments made to bidding behaviour, consistent with bidders converging towards optimality. The third essay examines the effect of two simultaneous policy changes, implemented in the Ontario dairy quota auction, to determine whether these changes were successful in achieving performance goals. Results of a series of regression models indicate that these two policy changes had no effect on clearing prices. Rather, these two policy changes were found to significantly reduce revenue from quantity purchased, total quantity transferred and total quantity offered. The combination of a significant reduction in bid prices and individual quantity demanded, paralleled by an increase in individual quantity offered appears to have been the underlying mechanisms, in terms of individual bidding/offering behaviour, through which the these two policies failed to meet performance goals.