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 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 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.

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 Three Essays in Empirical Industrial Organization written by Matthew Shum and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on Auctions and Bargaining written by Yumiko Baba and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 214 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 Three Empirical Essays on Internet Auctions written by and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

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 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 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 Three Essays on Collusion in English Auctions written by Uma Kaplan and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 109 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis is composed of three chapters that examine topics related to collusion in English auctions. In the first chapter, we develop a fully nonparametric identification framework and a test of collusion in ascending bid auctions. Assuming efficient collusion, we show that the underlying distributions of values can be identified despite collusive behavior when there is at least one known competitive bidder. We propose a nonparametric estimation procedure for the distributions of values and a bootstrap test of the null hypothesis of competitive behavior against the alternative of collusion. In the second chapter, we adopt a copula-based approach to identification. We succeed in showing that joint distribution function of private valuations is identifiable under certain conditions. Finally, we propose a semiparametric strategy, based on Archimedean copulas, to identify and estimate the model primitives and analyze the dependence relation between bids in English auctions. One advantage this approach has is that it allows us to separate the estimation of the marginal distribution from the estimation of the joint distribution of underlying bidder values. The third chapter is an empirical study of the municipal GIC auctions, motivated by the theoretical frameworks developed in the first two chapters.

Download or read book Three essays on empirical finance written by Tse-Chun Lin and published by Rozenberg Publishers. This book was released on 2009 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

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 Three Essays in the Theory of Auctions written by Jörg Nikutta and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 99 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 Auction Theory written by Xiaoshu Xu and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 63 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abstract: My dissertation consists of three chapters in theoretical auction analysis. The first chapter considers optimal sequential auctions with new bidders arriving in each period. The second chapter examines how resale affects bidding strategies and auction outcomes in an auction environment with costly entry. The third chapter investigates how resale affects bidding strategies and auction outcomes in a sequential auction setting where the values of items auctioned in different periods exhibit synergies. The first chapter gives a full characterization of the optimal sequential second-price (or ascending English) auctions with sequentially arriving bidders. There are n bidders in the first period and m new bidders arrive in the second period. Based on the auctioneer's commitment power, we study two cases: full commitment and noncommitment. In both cases, we establish the existence of a symmetric equilibrium characterized by a threshold strategy - -a bidder does not bid in the first auction when her valuation is below this threshold and bids according to an increasing function otherwise. In the noncommitment case, the auctioneer chooses an optimal reserve price to maximize the expected revenue from the second period; thus her decision of whether to include previous bidders as potential buyers is endogenously determined by the reserve price in the first auction. This might create multiple equilibria depending on the beliefs of the auctioneer and the bidders. We apply a fairly intuitive rule to establish the uniqueness. We also extend our analysis to allow for opportunities for resale, where the winner in the first auction can opt to resell the item to new bidders. The second chapter, joint with Dan Levin and Lixin Ye, studies how resale affects auctions with costly entry in a model where an arbitrary number of bidders possess two-dimensional private information signals: entry costs and valuations. We establish the existence of symmetric entry equilibrium and identify sufficient conditions under which the equilibrium is unique. Our analysis suggests that the opportunity of resale induces motivation for both speculative entry and bargain hunting abstentions. By following the uniform distribution for numerical analysis, our results suggest that while the entry probability and efficiency are always higher when resale is allowed, the auctioneer's expected revenue is lower when resale is allowed for almost all parameter values. We also compare this model to one where bidders may follow "strong" or "weak" distributions in terms of valuations. The third chapter, joint with Dan Levin and Lixin Ye, studies a sequential second-price auction of two objects with two bidders, where the winner of the package obtains a synergy from the second object. If reselling after the two auctions occurs, it proceeds as either monopoly or monopsony take-it-or-leave-it offer. I find that a post-auction resale has a significant impact on bidding strategies in the auctions. When seller makes a take-it-or-leave-it offer in resale, there is no equilibrium where at least one bidder reveals her type with positive probability. When buyer makes the offer instead, there exist symmetric increasing equilibrium strategies for both items. While allowing resale always improves efficiency, I demonstrate that the effect of resale is ambiguous on expected revenue as Ill as the probability of exposure. I also extend this model to allow for three bidders and provide the equilibrium analysis.