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 Essays on Value Distributions in All pay Auctions written by Suat Akbulut and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
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 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 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 Sponsored Search and Sequential Auctions written by Emmanuel Lorenzon and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis is a collection of three essays in theoretical auction analysis. Chapter 1 considersbid delegation in the GSP auction mechanism. In a game involving side-contracts and a compensationpolicy set by an agency, the first-best collusive outcome is achieved. We offer a characterization of the implementablebid profiles for the two-position game with three players. Chapter 2 considers the sequentialsale of an object to two buyers: one knows his private information and the other buyer does not. Buyershave a multi-unit demand and private valuations for each unit are perfectly correlated. An asymmetricequilibrium exists when the uninformed player adopts an aggressive bidding strategy. Conversely, hisinformed opponent behaves more conservatively by using bid shading. The bidding behaviour of theuninformed bidder is driven by the opportunity to learn his private valuation for free. This dynamic is atthe root of the decline in the equilibrium price across both sales. In chapter 3, information is observableduring the first-stage auction in a sequential-move game in which the first-mover bidder is observed byhis opponent. A separating equilibrium exists in which the informed bidder bids aggressively when he isthe first-mover which entails a non-participation strategy from his uninformed competitor. Conversely,the latter adopts a conservative behaviour when he is the first-mover. A pooling equilibrium in which theinformed bidder blurs his valuation can only exist if his uninformed opponent adopts a non-participatingstrategy.
Download or read book Three Essays in Auctions and Contests written by Jun Zhang and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis studies issues in auctions and contests. The seller of an object and the organizer of a contest have many instruments to improve the revenue of the auction or the efficiency of the contest. The three essays in this dissertation shed light on these issues. Chapter 2 investigates how a refund policy affects a buyer's strategic behavior by characterizing the equilibria of a second-price auction with a linear refund policy. I find that a generous refund policy induces buyers to bid aggressively. I also examine the optimal mechanism design problem when buyers only have private initial estimates of their valuations and may privately learn of shocks that affect their valuations later. When all buyers are \emph{ex-ante} symmetric, this optimal selling mechanism can be implemented by a first-price or second-price auction with a refund policy. Chapter 3 investigates how information revelation rules affect the existence and the efficiency of equilibria in two-round elimination contests. I establish that there exists no symmetric separating equilibrium under the full revelation rule and find that the non-existence result is very robust. I then characterize a partially efficient separating equilibrium under the partial revelation rule when players' valuations are uniformly distributed. I finally investigate the no revelation rule and find that it is both most efficient and optimal in maximizing the total efforts from the contestants. Within my framework, more information revelation leads to less efficient outcomes. Chapter 4 analyzes the signaling effect of bidding in a two-round elimination contest. Before the final round, bids in the preliminary round are revealed and act as signals of the contestants' private valuations. Compared to the benchmark model, in which private valuations are revealed automatically before the final round and thus no signaling of bids takes place, I find that strong contestants bluff and weak contestants sandbag. In a separating equilibrium, bids in the preliminary round fully reveal the contestants' private valuations. However, this signaling effect makes the equilibrium bidding strategy in the preliminary round steeper for high valuations and flatter for low valuations compared to the benchmark model.
Download or read book Three Essays written by Rong Chen and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Three Essays on Contests written by Qiang Fu and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 294 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 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.
Download or read book Three essays on auction theory and contest theory written by Yong Sui and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Three Essays on Auctions and Innovations written by Thomas Giebe and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 89 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Three Essays on Auctions and Innovation written by Thomas Giebe and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Essays on Nonparametric Identification and Estimation of All Pay Auctions and Contests written by Ksenia Shakhgildyan and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My dissertation contributes to the structural nonparametric econometrics of auctions and contests with incomplete information. It consists of three chapters. The first chapter investigates the identification and estimation of an all-pay auction where the object is allocated to the player with the highest bid, and every bidder pays his bid regardless of whether he wins or not. As a baseline model, I consider the setting, where one object is allocated among several risk-neutral participants with independent private values (IPV); however, I also show how the model can be extended to the multiunit case. Moreover, the model is not confined to the IPV paradigm, and I further consider the case where the bidders' private values are affiliated (APV). In both IPV and APV settings, I prove the identification and derive the consistent estimators of the distribution of the bidders' valuations using a structural approach similar to that of Guerre et al. (2000). Finally, I consider the model with risk-averse bidders. I prove that in general the model in this set-up is not identified even in the semi-parametric case where the utility function of the bidders is restricted to belong to the class of functions with constant absolute risk aversion (CARA). The second chapter proves the identification and derives the asymptotically normal estimator of a nonparametric contest of incomplete information with uncertainty. By uncertainty, I mean that the contest success function is not only determined by the bids of the players, but also by the variable, which I call uncertainty, with a nonparametric distribution, unknown to the researcher, but known to the bidders. This work is the first to consider the incomplete information contest with a nonparametric contest success function. The limiting case of the model when there is no uncertainty is an all-pay auction considered in the first chapter. The model with two asymmetric players is examined. First, I recover the distribution of uncertainty using the information on win outcomes and bids. Next, I adopt the structural approach of Guerre et al. (2000) to obtain the distribution of the bidders' valuations (or types). As an empirical application, I study the U.S. House of Representatives elections. The model provides a method to disentangle two sources of incumbency advantage: a better reputation, and better campaign financing. The former is characterized by the distribution of uncertainty and the latter by the difference in the distributions of candidates' types. Besides, two counterfactual analyses are performed: I show that the limiting expenditure dominates public campaign financing in terms of lowering total campaign spending as well as the incumbent's winning probability. The third chapter is a semiparametric version of the second chapter. In the case when the data is sparse, some restrictions on the nonparametric structure need to be put. In this work, I prove the identification and derive the consistent estimator of a contest of incomplete information, in which an object is allocated according to the serial contest success function. As in previous chapters, I recover the distribution of the bidders' valuations from the data on observed bids using a structural approach similar to that of Guerre et al. (2000) and He and Huang (2018). As a baseline model, I consider the symmetric contest. Further, the model is extended to account for the bidders' asymmetry.
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 Essays in Auction and Information written by Tao-yi Joseph Wang and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
