Asymmetric Auctions

The revenue-equivalence theorm for auctions predicts that expected seller revenue is independent of the bidding rules, as long as equilibrium has the properties that the buyer with the highest reservation price wins and any buyer with the lowest possible reservation price has zero expected surplus. Thus, in particular, the two most common auction institutions—the open 'English' and the sealed high-bid auction—are equivalent despite their rather different strategic properties.     

Market Selection and Asymmetric Information

We consider a dynamic general equilibrium asset pricing model with heterogeneous agents and asymmetric information. We show how agents' different methods of gathering information affect their chances of survival in the market depending upon the nature of the information and the level of noise in the economy.     

Information Provision in Procurement Auctions

We study the optimal provision of information in a procurement auction with horizontally differentiated goods. The buyer has private information about her preferred location on the product space and has access to a costless communication device. A seller who pays the entry cost may submit a bid comprising a location and a minimum price. We characterize the optimal information structure and show that the buyer prefers to attract only two bids. Further, additional sellers are inefficient since they reduce total and consumer surplus, gross of entry costs. We show that the buyer will not find it optimal to send public information to all sellers. On the other hand, she may profit from setting a minimum price and that a severe hold‐up problem arises if she lacks commitment to set up the rules of the auction ex ante.     

逆选择机制下的中小企业融资分析——非对称信息下银行与中小企业的委托代理模型

中小企业融资难问题是经济学界普遍关注的问题,其核心在于信息的非对称性。由于信息非对称,会诱发逆向选择和道德风险,导致中小企业在金融市场上被信贷配给。本文综述了前人的研究成果,并从信息问题出发,运用委托代理理论,在信息经济学的框架下分析和研究逆选择机制的发生及中小企业融资问题的根本所在,通过对完全信息和非对称信息下的合同进行对比分析,指出信息的重要性,最终从信息完善的视角,提出破解中小企业融资难问题的相关政策建议。     

Optimal Information Disclosure in Auctions and the Handicap Auction

We analyse a situation where a monopolist is selling an indivisible good to risk-neutral buyers who only have an estimate of their private valuations. The seller can release, without observing, certain additional signals that affect the buyers' valuations. Our main result is that in the expected revenue-maximizing mechanism, the seller makes available all the information that she can, and her expected revenue is the same as it would be if she could observe the part of the information that is "new" to the buyers. We also show that this mechanism can be implemented by what we call a handicap auction in interesting applications. In the first round of this auction, each buyer picks a price premium from a menu offered by the seller (a smaller premium costs more). Then the seller releases the additional signals. In the second round, the buyers bid in a second-price auction where the winner pays the sum of his premium and the second highest non-negative bid. In the case of a single buyer, this mechanism simplifies to a menu of European call options.     

Bidding and Information: Evidence from Gilt-edged Auctions

Many studies have shown that government debt auctions underprice debt compared with the secondary market. This paper corroborates this for certain forms of gilt auction by comparing the price received at auction with an almost identical parent stock in the secondary market. Although the sample is small, the parent/auction stock price comparison gives a cleaner measure than used in other studies. The paper also compares non-fungible auctions (where the auction stock differs slightly from the parent at auction and merges subsequently) with fully-fungible ones (where they are identical throughout). Significant underpricing only occurs in non-fungible auctions.     

Adverse Selection and Pigou Taxes

It id assumed that firms have different technologies, and that an environment protection agency knows which technologies exist, but not which is used by which firms. Neither the emissions of individual firms nor their total emissions are observable. The output of each individual firm, however, can be monitored without cost. Based on this information tax schemes are constructed which induce firms to produce the socially efficient output quantities. Conditions about cost functions are derived which ensure the existence of tax schemes which yield first best solutions.     

Asymmetric Information and Annuities

The standard Rothschild and Stiglitz (1976) and Wilson (1977) analysis of adverse selection economies is extended to a particular model of annuity market which features both elements of moral hazard and adverse selection. Individuals are heterogeneous with respect to time preferences and they make investments in health care that affect their survival probabilities. The main case considered is that where both preferences and investments (and hence the endogenous survival probabilities) are unobserved. Thus, the model captures a further source of inefficiency that is particular to annuity market: an endogenous correlation between the desire for annuities and the survival probabilities. The basic insights of Wilson (1977) —as worked out by Eckstein, Eichenbaum and Peled (1985) —are worth also in this new setting. When the equilibrium is separating, the government intervention may yield Pareto improvements. If the equilibrium is pooling, the government intervention may improve the well‐being of individuals affected by the inefficiencies and the negative externalities caused by the asymmetric information.     

Moral Hazard and Adverse Selection in Procurement Contracting

A model of procurement contracting is developed and tested in laboratory experiments. Market performance results are presented for both fixed-price and cost-sharing contracts. Contracts are awarded with first-price sealed-bid or second-price sealed-bid auctions. The environment contains post-auction cost uncertainty and opportunity for unmonitored effort in contract cost reduction. Cost-sharing contracts are found to reduce procurement expense but also to be inefficient because of their induced moral hazard waste and cost overruns.Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Numbers: C72, C92, D44, D61, D82, H57, L14.     

Self-Reporting and Ex Post Asymmetric Information

We consider a model of optimal law enforcement where sanctions are reduced for self-reporting individuals. Violators get private signals about their individual probabilities of apprehension after they committed a crime. Since violators will self-report if and only if the signal is above a specific threshold, the possibility of self-reporting has an option value that leads to a higher crime rate if the authority's effort remains unchanged. We demonstrate that self-reporting nevertheless increases social welfare even under the restriction that the crime rate must not be higher than without self-reporting. Received June 15, 2001; revised version received December 19, 2001     

Peer Group Formation in an Adverse Selection Model

This paper develops an adverse selection model where peer group systems are shown to trigger lower interest rates and remove credit rationing in the case where borrowers are uninformed about their potential partners and ex post state verification (or auditing) by banks is costly. Peer group formation reduces interest rates due to a 'collateral effect', namely, cross subsidisation amongst borrowers acts as collateral behind a loan. By uncovering such a collateral effect, this paper shows that peer group systems can be viewed as an effective risk pooling mechanism, and thus enhance efficiency, not just in the full information set up.     

不对称信息与凯恩斯主义投资理论

有效市场理论认为资本资产价格只不过是一幅面纱，实际经济活动是由经济主体的偏好和技术决定的。在凯恩斯主义体系中，金融市场在决定经济的路径中起到核心的作用。通过对金融市场上不对称信息的考察，可以得出这一结论。企业在外在融资的提供者即贷款者能够获取的信息是不同的，这种信息不对称导致金融约束的出现，在这种情况下，对投资的限制来自金融市场而不是来自技术或者偏好。     

Repeated Elections with Asymmetric Information

An infinite sequence of elections with no term limits is modelled. In each period a challenger with privately known preferences is randomly drawn from the electorate to run against the incumbent, and the winner chooses a policy outcome in a one-dimensional issue space. One theorem is that there exists an equilibrium in which the median voter is decisive: an incumbent wins re-election if and only if his most recent policy choice gives the median voter a payoff at least as high as he would expect from a challenger. The equilibrium is symmetric, stationary, and the behavior of voters is consistent with both retrospective and prospective voting. A second theorem is that, in fact, it is the only equilibrium possessing the latter four conditions — decisiveness of the median voter is implied by them.     

Multidimensional Bargaining Under Asymmetric Information

A buyer with private information regarding marginal valuation bargains with a seller to determine price and quantity of trade. Depending on parameter values, a high‐valuation buyer wants either to reveal information to create value or to conceal it to capture value. In the first case, equilibrium trades are efficient. In the second case, the low‐valuation buyer purchases less than her efficient quantity, and there can be a one‐period delay in trade. The quantity distortion is the only inefficiency that persists when time between offers approaches zero. There exist equilibria that are independent of the seller's prior beliefs.     

Repeated Contests with Asymmetric Information

The same contestants often meet repeatedly in contests. Behavior in a contest potentially provides information with regard to one's type and can therefore influence the behavior of the opponents in later contests. This paper shows that if effort is observable, this can induce a ratchet effect in contests: high ability contestants sometimes put in little effort in an early round in order to make the opponents believe that they are of little ability. The effect reduces overall effort and increases equilibrium utility of the contestants when compared with two unrelated one-shot contests. It does, however, also introduce an allocative inefficiency since sometimes a contestant with a low valuation wins. The model assumes an imperfectly discriminating contest. In an extension I show that, qualitatively, results are similar in a perfectly discriminating contest (all pay auction).     

逆向选择、信用担保与银行信贷契约设计

本文从引入第三方信用担保的角度,探讨防范中小企业信贷市场逆向选择发生的银行信贷契约设计问题.研究认为,在信息不对称的条件下,考虑到银行内部信贷治理机制因素,银行基层机构将对高风险中小企业实行高担保、高贷给率;对低风险中小企业实行低担保、低贷给率.另外,引入担保企业的前提条件是其能够有效缓解银行与中小企业问的信息不对称问题,在银行与中小企业之间起信息桥梁的作用,防范信贷市场逆向选择的发生.     

积累性创新、信息不对称和激励

在积累性创新链中,创新收益在序贯创新者之间的分配是一个重要的激励问题,一个良好的创新激励机制应该使得积累性创新的利益在序贯创新者之间进行合理的分配。本文基于信息不对称的假定,研究了积累性创新中最优专利许可费大小和时序决定问题。与Green＆Scotchmer、Scotchmer的结论不同,我们发现,事前专利许可并不一定能够解决先期创新者对后续创新者的敲竹杠行为。本研究为现实中观察到的一些产业中事后专利许可现象提供了理论上的解释。     

Entry and Competition Effects in First-Price Auctions: Theory and Evidence from Procurement Auctions

Motivated by several interesting features of the highway mowing auction data from the Texas Department of Transportation (TDoT), we study three competing procurement auction models with endogenous entry. Our entry and bidding models provide several interesting implications. For the first time, we show that even within an independent private value paradigm, as the number of potential bidders increases, bidders' equilibrium bidding behaviour can become less aggressive, and the expected procurement cost may rise because the "entry effect" is always positive and may dominate the negative "competition effect". We then develop structural models of entry and bidding corresponding to the three models under consideration, controlling for unobserved auction heterogeneity, and use the recently developed semi-parametric Bayesian estimation method to analyse the data. We select the model that best fits the data, and use the corresponding structural estimates to quantify the "entry effect" and the "competition effect" with regard to the individual bids and the procurement cost.     

Adverse Selection when Jobs are Hard to Do

Privately observed ability increases output and reduces effort required to complete tasks, in a model where harder tasks produce more output. The relation between average quality of the workforce and the wage rate is ambiguous. The model also produces a rat-race, in the sense that some individuals work harder than is socially optimal. This distortion can be corrected by a non-linear tax.