NON‐COOPERATIVE ENTRY DETERRENCE IN LICENSE AUCTIONS: DYNAMIC VERSUS SEALED BID*

We examine the impact of potential entry on incumbent bidding behavior in license auctions, in both dynamic and sealed bid formats. Unlike sealed bid auctions, dynamic auctions reveal information about the identities of potential winners and allow bidders to revise their bids. This helps incumbents to coordinate their entry deterrence efforts. If entry is sufficiently costly for each incumbent, only the dynamic auction has an equilibrium where entry is deterred for sure. Numerical calculations suggest that, regardless of how costly entry is for each incumbent, sealed bid auctions can generate a higher probability of entry as well as a more efficient allocation.     

An Empirical Analysis of Entrant and Incumbent Bidding in Road Construction Auctions

This paper explores differences in the bidding patterns of entrants and incumbents in road construction auctions. We find that entrants bid more aggressively and win auctions with significantly lower bids than incumbents. The differences in their bidding patterns are consistent with a model of auctions in which the distribution of an entrant's costs exhibits greater dispersion than that of an incumbent's and relations of stochastic dominance in the distributions do not persist for the entire range of estimated costs. We also find that more efficient firms bid, on average, more aggressively and firms with greater backlogs bid less aggressively.     

Asymmetric Cost Pass-Through in Multi-Unit Procurement Auctions: An Experimental Approach*

We explore input cost pass-through in multi-unit procurement auctions. Whether cost shocks are private versus common across firms has important implications for discriminatory, but not uniform price auctions. We provide evidence of asymmetric pass-through of private cost shocks in discriminatory auctions. Unlike uniform price auctions, revenue-maximizing bidders in discriminatory auctions ‘pad’ bids close to the expected clearing price for units with costs below that price, but they do not bid below cost on higher cost units. Therefore, if costs are higher than expected, the clearing price rises and if costs are lower than expected, the clearing price remains high.     

Resident Bid Preference,Affiliation, and Procurement Competition: Evidence from New Mexico

In public procurement auctions, governments routinely offer preferences to qualified firms in the form of bid discounts. Previous studies on bid discounting do not account for affiliation – a form of cost dependence between bidders that is likely to occur in a public procurement environment. Utilizing data from the New Mexico Department of Transportation’s Resident Preference Program, I develop and estimate an empirical model of firm bidding and entry that allows for affiliation in firms’ project costs. I find evidence of affiliation and show how it changes preference auction outcomes.     

On Strategic Quantity Bidding in Multiple Unit Auctions

Standard studies of multiple unit auctions generally overlook the strategic role of bidders' quantity decisions. Using a simple equilibrium model of bidding I analyze bidders' incentives to choose quantities in discriminatory and competitive auctions. The main result is that bidders have a stronger strategic incentive to bid for fewer units in competitive auctions. Since under competition a bidder pays the lowest accepted price for each unit she gets, she may benefit from dropping her quantity to let lower-valuing bidders enter the set of winners. This prediction is consistent with empirical observations from foreign currency and spectrum auctions.     

The Impact of Timing on Bidding Behavior in Procurement Auctions of Contracts with Private Costs

We provide a comparison of bidding behavior between multi-round and single-round auctions considering bid lettings for asphalt construction contracts that are known to have primarily private costs. Using a reduced-form difference-in-difference approach as well as the nonparametric estimation technique that was proposed by Racine and Li (J Econom 119(1):99–130, 2004) we find that bidding is more aggressive in a sequential multi-round setting than in a simultaneous single-round format. We explore potential causes for the bidding difference across formats that are related to synergies and the level of bidder participation.     

Supply function equilibria with capacity constraints and pivotal suppliers

The concept of a supply function equilibrium (SFE) has been widely used to model generators' bidding behavior and market power issues in wholesale electricity markets. Observers of electricity markets have noted how generation capacity constraints may contribute to market power of generation firms. If a generation firm's rivals are capacity constrained then the firm may be pivotal; that is, the firm could substantially raise the market price by unilaterally withholding output. However the SFE literature has not fully considered the impact of capacity constraints and pivotal firms on equilibrium predictions. We characterize the set of symmetric supply function equilibria for uniform-price auctions when firms are capacity constrained and show that this set is increasing as capacity per firm rises. We provide conditions under which asymmetric equilibria exist and characterize these equilibria. In addition, we compare results for uniform-price auctions to those for discriminatory auctions, and we compare our SFE predictions to equilibrium predictions of models in which bidders are constrained to bid on discrete units of output.     

Optimal bid disclosure in patent license auctions under alternative modes of competition

The literature on patent license auctions in oligopoly assumed that the auctioneer reveals the winning bid and stressed that this gives firms an incentive to bid high in order to signal an aggressive output strategy in a downstream Cournot market game, and conversely bid low to signal acquiescent pricing in a Bertrand market game. The present paper examines the information revealed by publishing the winning or the losing or no bid, assuming an oligopoly with differentiated goods. We rank disclosure rules and find that it is not optimal for the innovator to disclose the winning bid, regardless of the mode of competition.     

Auction Reforms for Effective Official Development Assistance

Auctions, which are applicable to aid-related procurement systems, have been recently recognized as an important tool for improving economic efficiency. Using data on procurement auctions for Japanese official development assistance projects, the equilibrium bid function is estimated. The data reveals that a 1% increase in the number of bidders decreases the equilibrium bid by about 0.2%. This implies that strengthening competition at procurement auctions lowers contract prices and mitigates the heavy indebtedness of developing countries. Auctions are also instrumental in fostering local business environment and governance. For intensifying bidding competition, it is useful to introduce an electronic bidding system, encourage local firms to jointly bid, and relax excessive qualification requirements.     

Asymmetric information in oil and gas lease auctions with a national company

This paper analyzes bidding behavior in oil and gas tract auctions in Brazil, where the main winner has been Petrobras, a national company. We test predictions from the theory of common-value, first-price, sealed-bid auctions with asymmetric information. The tests indicate that Petrobras was better informed about tract values than other bidders. We show that Petrobras bid higher than its competitors for more profitable tracts, and that it bid more frequently than its competitors for tracts being re-offered after receiving no bids in previous auctions. We also find evidence that Petrobras could bid competitively in a limited number of auctions only, and we discuss how our results can help to improve oil and gas tract auction rules.     

Efficiency in Second-Price Auctions: A New Look at Old Data

Experiments on second-price sealed-bid private value auctions have established that subjects typically bid more than their value, despite the fact that value bidding is a dominant strategy in such auctions. Moreover, the laboratory evidence shows that subjects do not learn to bid their values as they gain more experience. In the present paper, we re-examine the second-price auction data from Kagel and Levin’s (Econ J 103:868–879, 1993) classic paper. We find that auction efficiency increases over time, even though the frequency of overbidding is unchanged. We argue that the rise in efficiency is due to a decline in the variability of overbidding. This is consistent with subjects’ learning to bid more like each other.     

Competitive targeted online advertising

This paper examines how an online publisher utilizes its information about consumer preference to target advertising. In our model, two firms first bid for a prominent ad position in a publisher-organized position auction, and then compete on price in the subsequent product marketplace. We consider two dimensions of consumer heterogeneity. First, consumers are heterogeneous in product preference. Based on their tastes, some consumers prefer one product over the other, whereas other consumers may rank the products in an opposite order. Second, consumers differ in search preference, i.e., “nonshoppers” only consider the advertised product, while “shoppers” always search both firms’ products before buying. We show that targeted advertising based on product preference will mitigate price competition in product markets as well as competition in position auctions, the latter to the detriment of the publisher. In contrast, targeted advertising based on search preference always benefits the publisher, as the winning firm can charge monopoly prices to nonshoppers. We show that the publisher’s optimal choice is to utilize only the information about consumer search preference. We also explore the welfare implications of targeted advertising based on different types of consumer preference.     

Penny auctions

This paper studies penny auctions, a novel auction format in which every bid increases the price by a small amount, but placing a bid is costly. Outcomes of real-life penny auctions are often surprising. Even when selling cash, the seller may obtain revenue that is much higher or lower than its nominal value, and losers in an auction sometimes pay much more than the winner. This paper characterizes all symmetric Markov-perfect equilibria of penny auctions and studies penny auctions’ properties. The results show that a high variance of outcomes is a natural property of the penny auction format and high revenues are inconsistent with rational risk-neutral participants.     

Auction choice

While there is a big literature that compares revenue in common auctions, very little attention has been paid to the economic significance of revenue rankings. In this paper we develop a robust method for computing equilibrium bid functions and comparing revenue from the sealed high-bid and open auctions. We use our program to show that the effects of affiliation and risk aversion are typically small, while the effects of asymmetry are economically large unless the auctioneer has as much information about bidders as they do about each other.We also characterize the effects of asymmetry for the n-bidder case.     

The Pricing Structure of Legal Services: Do Lawyers Offer What Clients Want?

Review of Industrial Organization - We analyze clients’ contract choices in auctions where Dutch law firms compete for standard cases such as labor disputes for individuals and collecting...     

Securities auctions with pre-project information management

This paper analyzes securities auctions in which bidders have an option to acquire information after winning the right to develop a project. The payment consists of an up-front cash bid and a contingent security bid, which distorts investment and information acquisition relative to the first-best. We order securities in terms of their steepness: the payment of a steeper security is more sensitive to high project values. The agent’s incentives to acquire information that prevents either cost overruns (Type I errors) or false cancellations (Type II errors) decrease with the steepness of securities. The optimal limited-liability securities auction involves bidding debt that minimizes the distortions in the agent’s incentives to acquire performance-enhancing information. The model delivers implications on the practices commonly observed in oil lease auctions.     

All–Pay Auctions with Variable Rewards

We study all–pay auctions with variable rewards under incomplete information. In standard models, a reward depends on a bidder's privately known type; however, in our model it is also a function of his bid. We show that in such models there is a potential for paradoxical behavior where a reduction in the rewards or an increase in costs may increase the expected sum of bids or alternatively the expected highest bid.     

Inferring ascending auction participation from observed bidders

Participation in internet auctions goes well beyond those who place a bid. Participants arrive in random order, and if the auction’s standing price has already exceeded a participant’s valuation, she will not bid. Even so, her unreported valuation is a relevant part of demand for the item, and in an alternate random order, her bid would have been registered. I provide a method to estimate the average number of participants from the average number of bidders per auction. This enables estimation of the distribution of participant valuations from either the distribution of closing prices or the distribution of all observed bids.     

Entry into auctions: An experimental analysis

This paper investigates entry decisions into first and second-price auctions using an experimental design to extract information on willingness-to-pay to enter (WTE). We find that subjects tend to overpay to enter both auction formats. In particular, if the subjects believe they will be bidding against bidders following the risk-neutral Nash strategy, their WTE is greater than the optimal risk-neutral amount 97% of the time for first-price auctions (FPA) and 90% for second-price auctions (SPA). If they believe that they are bidding against subjects who bid as do the other subjects, they submit a WTE that is too high 92% of the time for FPA and 69% of the time for SPA. We also find, in line with previous studies, significant overbidding in both the FPA and SPA. We then investigate whether introducing risk aversion (RA) or “joy of winning” (JOY) can explain the joint observation of over-entry and overbidding. In particular, using bid data alone, we structurally estimate three models, one allowing RA only, one allowing for JOY only and one allowing for both RA and JOY. While a model with JOY alone overestimates WTE, we find that RA alone can explain 38% of WTE but a model with both RA and JOY (where RA is estimated using FPA bids, and JOY is estimated using SPA bids) can explain 65% of WTE. Moreover, JOY appears to explain nearly all of the male WTE but only 44% of the female WTE.     

Joint bidding and horizontal subcontracting

This paper investigates joint bidding when firms have incentives to sign subcontracts with each other after competing in the bidding stage. A bidding consortium affects the horizontal subcontracting market and, through backward induction, alters firms’ bids. Our findings challenge the current legal practice that consortia without efficiencies must pass the “no-solo-bidding test”, requiring that its members could not bid stand-alone. Our framework predicts that the formation of a temporary consortium, which has the feature that it dissolves after submitting a losing bid, benefits the procurer. The winning bid is more competitive with a temporary as compared to a structural consortium.