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 Partnerships Signaling and Contests written by Cédric Wasser and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

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 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 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 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 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 Four Essays in Auction Theory and Contest Theory written by Dmitriy Knyazev and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Market Design and Auction Theory written by Seungwon (Eugene) Jeong and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three essays on market design and auction theory. In Chapter 1, I introduce new multidimensional auction mechanisms. In many auctions, because of externalities, each bidder has a different maximum willingness to pay in order to beat each specific competitor, which causes the following new problem. When there are three bidders, two bidders might compete against each other unnecessarily and have worse payoffs than if they had lost to the third bidder, i.e., the two bidders have "group winner regret, " which can also lead to inefficiency. While no one-dimensional-bid mechanism is efficient, the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) may require losers to pay. This paper introduces a novel mechanism, the "multidimensional second-price" (MSP) auction (and its open ascending version), and characterizes it. MSP is free of a loser's payment, pairwise stable, and has good incentive properties, including no group winner regret. Moreover, the winner cannot win at any different price by any misreport, and a loser cannot be better off winning by any misreport. MSP is strategyproof for a bidder without externalities imposed by others, and it reduces to the second-price auction when there are no externalities. Simulations suggest that MSP outperforms the second-price auction in terms of both revenue and efficiency. In Chapter 2, I study properties of VCG when externalities exist, and introduce shill bidding strategies that weakly dominate truthful bidding. When externalities exist, VCG is efficient, incentive compatible, and individually rational. However, as occurs in package auctions without externalities, VCG outcomes may not be in the core. Moreover, VCG is not pairwise stable. Due to externalities, several additional problems occur. VCG may require losing bidders to pay, which might be undesirable. Also, it might be budget infeasible, and the auctioneer might need to pay the winner a subsidy. The subsidy problem can occur even when all bids are positive. Furthermore, unlike package auctions without externalities, there exists a shill bidding strategy that weakly dominates truthful bidding. In addition, when this shill bidding is used, there is no Nash equilibrium. Each bidder is better off using an infinite number of shills, which eventually makes VCG undefined. In Chapter 3, I study properties of VCG in the advertising auction setting. Even though VCG is incentive compatible (IC) in the advertising auction setting, the actual implementation of VCG in practice is not VCG per se. The main reason is that the price needs to be determined when the billing event happens at the same time as the estimation of click-through rate (CTR) or position discount (PD) is occurring. After all, advertising auctions charge the estimate of externalities. However, even in this "estimated" VCG (eVCG), CTR miscalibration does not ruin IC. Even when PD miscalibration exists, IC still holds with "perfect competition." Regarding efficiency and revenue, both CTR and PD miscalibrations matter. Interestingly, however, the revenue of the auctioneer does not necessarily decrease by underbidding.

Download or read book Putting Auction Theory to Work written by Paul Milgrom and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-01-12 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a comprehensive introduction to modern auction theory and its important new applications. It is written by a leading economic theorist whose suggestions guided the creation of the new spectrum auction designs. Aimed at graduate students and professionals in economics, the book gives the most up-to-date treatments of both traditional theories of 'optimal auctions' and newer theories of multi-unit auctions and package auctions, and shows by example how these theories are used. The analysis explores the limitations of prominent older designs, such as the Vickrey auction design, and evaluates the practical responses to those limitations. It explores the tension between the traditional theory of auctions with a fixed set of bidders, in which the seller seeks to squeeze as much revenue as possible from the fixed set, and the theory of auctions with endogenous entry, in which bidder profits must be respected to encourage participation.

Download or read book Essays on Auction Theory written by Justin Ellis Burkett and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Information Disclosure and Auction Theory written by Shota Ichihashi and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three essays on information economics and auction theory. The first chapter studies the question of what information consumers should disclose to firms. A consumer discloses information to a multi-product firm, which learns about his preferences, sets prices, and makes product recommendations. While the consumer benefits from disclosure as it enables the firm to make accurate recommendations, the firm may use the information to price discriminate. I show that the firm prefers to commit to not price discriminate, which encourages the consumer to provide information that is useful for product recommendations. However, nondiscriminatory pricing hurts the consumer, who would be better off by precommitting to withhold some information. In contrast to single-product models, equilibrium is typically inefficient even if the consumer can disclose any information about his preferences. The second chapter studies the problem of restricting the information available to the sender in a game of strategic communication. Assuming that the receiver has a binary choice, I characterize the "optimal information restriction, " which maximizes the equilibrium payoff of the receiver among all the information restrictions for the sender. The final chapter studies the optimal timing of an auction in a setting where bidders arrive and depart stochastically over time. First, we compare the revenue-maximizing timing and welfare-maximizing timing. We show that sellers hold auctions too late or too early whenever (censored at 0) virtual values are more or less right-skewed than values. In particular, we show that sellers typically hold auctions inefficiently late. Second, we prove that the use of simple timing rules (i.e., a fixed deadline chosen in advance) can lose an arbitrarily large fraction of the revenue from the optimal stopping rule.

Download or read book Essays on the Theory of Auctions written by Anne Elizabeth Lacey and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three essays, each of which addresses a different aspect of reputation in independent private values auctions. Each essay presents a model where a single long-run player faces short-run opponents in a sequence of auctions. Bidding is costly, and each auction has a reserve price.

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 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 Essays in Multi unit Auction Theory written by David Lloyd McAdams and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: