An experimental investigation of soft price caps in uniform price auction markets for wholesale electricity

This paper presents the results from an auction experiment using industry professionals and student participants who compete in a simulated wholesale market for electricity. Motivated by the intervention by FERC in response to the “meltdown” of the California spot market, we investigate the effect of including a “soft” price cap in a uniform price auction as a means of mitigating high prices. When prices are driven above the soft cap, offer curves become flat, in contrast to the hockey stick shape observed in a typical uniform price auction for electricity. This flat offer curve leads to market prices that are relatively insensitive to both generation costs and demand reductions.      

Hypothetical–actual bid calibration of a multigood auction

Evidence suggests the calibration of hypothetical and actual behavior is good-specific. We examine whether clustering commodities into mutual categories can reduce the burden. While we reject a common calibration across sets of commodities, a sport-specific calibration function cannot be rejected.     

Deterring collusion with a reserve price: an auction experiment

Experimental Economics - We experimentally compare collusive behaviors in first-price sealed-bid auctions without and with a reserve price. Before the auction begins, a bidder may offer a bribe to...     

Market structure and buyer behaviour: Price adjustment in a multi-object progressive oral auction

Working within the framework of an English, or progressive oral, auction with multiple unit trading, the study addresses the question of the effect on price behaviour of variations in market size — in the sense of the number of equal-sized market competitors. Prices are shown to converge to near competitive equilibrium levels upon replication, whatever the market size. However, by extending the focus of the study beyond equilibrium to the market behaviour revealed during the adjustment or disequilibrium phase of the market, it is possible to advance some conjectures on the nature of the equilibrating processes.     

Equilibria in second price auctions with participation costs

We investigate equilibria of sealed-bid second price auctions with bidder participation costs in the independent private values environment. We focus on equilibria in cutoff strategies (participate and bid the valuation iff it is greater than the cutoff), since if a bidder finds it optimal to participate, she cannot do better than bidding her valuation. When bidders are symmetric, concavity (strict convexity) of the cumulative distribution function from which the valuations are drawn is a sufficient condition for uniqueness (multiplicity) within this class. We also study a special case with asymmetric bidders and show that concavity/convexity plays a similar role.     

附加职工安置约束的国企产权拍卖机制研究

The transfer of SOE’s property right involves benefits readjustment of its stakeholders; therefore the design of the trading mechanism is not only to sell the SOE with a high price but also to realize other non-price objectives such as rearrangement of original employees, further development of the enterprise etc. This paper constructs a bidding mechanism with the constraint of accommodating employees to analyze the tradeoff between maximizing SOE auction revenue and minimizing induced unemployment. By adding that the winner is required to settle down a certain quantity of former SOE employees in the new enterprise, this mechanism brings on the competition among prospective investors in both the price and the quantity of employment, which can help the government to balance the different objectives more efficiently. However, the constraint will only work under the condition that the government has stressed sufficiently on the employees’ rearrangement and set the best constraint threshold. Moreover, the government should set an explicit compensation standard for the induced lay-offs to eliminate the investors’ accommodating cost dispersion and introduce more strategic investors with considerable heterogeneity to participate in the bidding. __________ Translated from Jingji yanjiu 经济研究 (Economic Research Journal), 2007, (10):115–125     

Strategic price discounting and rationing in uniform price auctions

I modify the uniform-price auction rules in allowing the seller to ration bidders. This allows me to provide a strategic foundation for underpricing when the seller has an interest in ownership dispersion. Moreover, many of the so-called “collusive-seeming” equilibria disappear.     

The price of owning a car: an analysis of auction quota premium in Singapore

Faced with dilemmas parallel to countries besieged by road congestions and limited land resources, Singapore has chosen to adapt a Vehicle Quota System (VQS) whereby car owners are required to bid for a licence in an auction before their vehicles are allowed onto the road. In this study, the behaviour of VQS auction prices is examined using a structural time series approach. For outliers that are not observable from innovations, auxiliary residuals with dummy variables are used to supplement the analysis. In general, prices exhibit a fairly constant seasonal pattern. The inclusion of monthly VQS quotas released by the transport regulatory body and the national stock market index is not useful in explaining the observed price behaviour. Interestingly, a basic structural model with stochastic components seems to fit the data best.     

Asymmetric Equilibria in a Model with Costly Voting

Most of the voting models limit their analysis to the investigation of symmetric equilibria where “similar” voters make “similar” voting decisions. In this paper we examine the validity of this restriction in a model with costly plurality voting. We first show that in any pure strategy equilibrium every two individuals who have the same preferences and participate in elections, would vote for the same candidate. However, this result does not hold for mixed strategies equilibria.     

First-price auction symmetric equilibria with a general distribution

In this paper I obtain the mixed strategy symmetric equilibria of the independent private values, first-price auction for any distribution of valuations. The equilibrium strategy is a pure strategy at the continuity points of the distribution and bids a mixed strategy at the discontinuity points of the distribution.     

Equilibria in reflexive Banach lattices with a continuum of agents

We consider exchange economies with a measure space of agents and for which the commodity space is a separable and reflexive Banach lattice. Under assumptions imposing uniform bounds on marginal rates of substitution, positive results on core-Walras equivalence were established in Rustichini-Yannelis [27] and Podczeck [25]. In this paper we prove that under similar assumptions on marginal rates of substitution, the set of competitive equilibria (and thus the core) is non-empty.     

Auctions with a buy price

eBay and Yahoo allow sellers to list their auctions with a buy price at which a bidder may purchase the item immediately. On eBay, the buy-now option disappears once a bid is placed, while on Yahoo the buy-now option remains in effect throughout the auction. We show that when bidders are risk averse, both types of auctions raise seller revenue for a wide range of buy prices. The Yahoo format raises more revenue than the eBay format when bidders have either CARA or DARA. Bidders with DARA prefer the eBay auction, while bidders with CARA are indifferent between the two. Part of this work was completed while Reynolds was a visitor at Instituto de Analisys Economico in Barcelona and while Wooders was a visitor at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. We are grateful to these institutions for their hospitality.     

Maxmin mechanism in a simple common value auction

This paper models the data generating process of common value auctions in a parameter-estimation way, known as the classical approach in statistical inference. Viewing the true value of the object as a parameter that nobody ever knows, we let our value function be the average of the individual estimations (signals) of all agents, a robust estimation of the parameter. Under this simple value function, we select almost uniquely the mechanism that gives the seller the largest portion of the true value in the worst situation among all the direct mechanisms that are feasible, ex-post implementable and individual rational. Our Maxmin mechanism, which randomly assigns the object to one agent, provides the seller (n−1)/n$(n-1)/n$ of the true value when expected revenue is concerned, where n$n$ is the number of the agents.     

Equilibria in infinite-dimensional production economies with convexified coalitions

Summary. This paper deals with a private ownership production economy assuming that the commodity space is infinite-dimensional. It is first showed that the fuzzy core allocations, a concept that goes back to J.-P. Aubin, are in a one-to-one correspondence with certain core allocations of a continuum economy suitably defined. This result is obtained under convexity of preferences and production sets and separability of the commodity space. In the case of nonconvex preferences and production sets, the set of fuzzy coalitions can be enlarged in order to obtain that every allocation of the core accordingly defined is supported by a non zero price. The proof of the equivalence result when the positive cone of the commodity space has the empty interior, is obtained under assumptions of properness for preferences relations and production sets. Received: July 9, 1998; revised version: December 6, 1999     

The optimal bid/ask spread in a Specialist System

In this work we propose a simple market model where some features of the Specialist System are analyzed. In particular, the specialist's obligation to display bid/ask quotes on the book within the bounds imposed by the Exchange is considered. The proposed model allows to analyze the effects of the specialist's interventions on the short term dynamics of bid/ask prices and address a relevant market design issue, that is determination and analysis of the optimal endogenous upper bound that - according to economic conditions - should be imposed by Stock Exchange on the quoted bid/ask spread. The institutional details are summarized in a few structural parameters and the focus is on the aggregate effects of excess demand/supply.     

First-price equilibrium and revenue equivalence in a sequential procurement auction model

We analyze first-price equilibrium bidding behavior of capacity-constrained firms in a sequence of two procurement auctions. In the model, firms with a cost advantage in completing the project auctioned off at the end of the sequence may enter the unfavored first auction hoping to lose it. Equilibrium bidding in both auctions deviates from the standard Symmetric Independent Private Value auction model due to opportunity costs of bidding created by possibly employed capacity. For this sequential auction model with non-identical objects, we show that revenue equivalence applies.     

Relative price fluctuations in a two-sector model with imperfect competition

Counter-cyclical fluctuations in the price of investment in consumption units are often attributed to investment-specific technology shocks. This paper looks at an additional source for such fluctuations: sector-specific markup variations, the idea being that pro-cyclical competition and the higher variability of investment compared to consumption pushes down the relative price of investment during expansions. I find that such endogenous movements in sector-specific markups can account for up to about one quarter of the observed fluctuations in the price of investment.