Ex-post full surplus extraction,straightforwardly

Consider an estimate of the common value of an auctioned asset that is symmetric in the bidders’ types. Such an estimate can be represented solely in terms of the order statistics of those types. This representation forms the basis for a pricing rule yielding truthful bidding as an equilibrium, whether bidders’ types are affiliated or independent. We highlight the link between the estimator and full surplus extraction, providing a necessary and sufficient condition for ex-post full surplus extraction, including the possibility of independent types. The results offer sharp insights into the strengths and limits of simple auctions by identifying the source of informational rents in such environments. Harstad acknowledges hospitable accommodation by the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, and the Olin School of Business, Washington University in St. Louis, during parts of this research. We are grateful for comments and suggestions from Richard McLean and Jeroen Swinkels.     

Trading for the future: Signaling in permit markets

Permit markets are celebrated as a policy instrument since they allow (i) firms to equalize marginal costs through trade and (ii) the regulator to distribute the burden in a politically desirable way. These two concerns, however, may conflict in a dynamic setting. Anticipating the regulator's future desire to give more permits to firms that appear to need them, firms purchase permits to signal their need. This raises the price above marginal costs and the market becomes inefficient. If the social cost of pollution is high and the government intervenes frequently in the market, the distortions are greater than the gains from trade and non-tradable permits are better. The analysis helps to understand permit markets and how they should be designed.     

Flexible Integration? Mandatory and Minimum Participation Rules

For a club such as the European Union, an important question is whether a subset of the members should be allowed to form “inner clubs” and enhance cooperation. Flexible cooperation allows members to participate if and only if they benefit, but it leads to free‐riding when externalities are positive. I show that flexible cooperation is better if the heterogeneity is large and the externality small, but that rigid cooperation is the political equilibrium too often. Both regimes, however, are extreme variants of a more general system combining mandatory and minimum participation rules. For each rule, I characterize the optimum and the equilibrium.     

Dominant Strategy Adoption and Bidders' Experience with Pricing Rules

Truthful revelation is a dominant strategy in both English (oral ascending bid) and second-price sealed-bid private-values auctions. Controlled observations of English auctions are largely consistent with the dominant strategy prediction, but laboratory second-price auctions exhibit substantial and persistent overbidding, even with prior experience. However, the experience of having bid in an English auction has a significant learning effect, moving bidding in subsequent second-price auctions closer to the dominant strategy. I explore two treatments isolating facets of the lessons learned from English auction participation, leading me to the following conclusions. Part of the lesson carried over appears to be considering prices one-by-one, but most of it appears to be a crude awareness that overbidding leads to losses. A claim that English auction experience teaches subjects to recognize the dominant strategy in second-price auctions seems overly optimistic. I introduce a nonparametric technique to test coefficient restrictions when the assumption of normally distributed errors is untenable.     

Symmetric bidding in second-price, common-value auctions

That second-price, common-value auctions have a unique symmetric equilibrium is shown by demonstrating a useful property: the equilibrium bid dominates any local common bias.     

Behavioral explanations of efficient public good allocations

Theorists have studied decentralized allocation mechanisms by characterizing the Cournot-Nash equilibria of the mechanism. However, when a mechanism is operationalized by an iterative decision process, and agents derive utility only from the final outcome, Cournot behavior may not be an appropriate solution concept. We suggest two alternative behavioral models, reservation behavior and satisficing behavior, which recognize the impact of the iterative process upon incentives, yet maintain some of the critical simplifications that have made Cournot behavior an attractive model.We report on nine public good experiments with a Groves-Ledyard general equilibrium mechanism. Overall, the experiments attain highly efficient allocations, despite widespread violations of Cournot behavior. We suggest the explanation that most subjects initially followed reservation behavior, and then came to adopt satisficing behavior.     

Franchise Bidding Without Holdups: Utility Regulation with Efficient Pricing and Choice of Provider

The idea of franchise bidding, as a governance structure for regulating natural monopoly, has remained dormant for the last twenty years, during which the technology and regulation of natural monopoly has changed considerably, both in theory and in practice. Meanwhile, auction theory has advanced significantly, independently of regulatory economics, which has moved in a different direction, namely price-cap regulation. We seek to combine the effects of the changes in the technology of network industries and the advances in bidding theory and in regulatory economics toward the development of a rigorous model of franchise bidding. The model presented in this paper, which develops conditions for efficient outcomes, provides a benchmark to begin a reconsideration of the potential of franchise bidding. In particular, for the first time, we complete Demsetz' (1968) proposal by specifying (second-price) rules for bidding and for transfer of assets when the incumbent loses the bid at re-auction. The scheme features one bid determining simultaneously output pricing and asset transfer pricing, to address concerns of hold-up and opportunistic behavior in the event of a change in franchisee.     

Information aggregation in auctions with an unknown number of bidders

Information aggregation, a key concern for uniform-price, common-value auctions with many bidders, has been characterized in models where bidders know exactly how many rivals they face. A model allowing for uncertainty over the number of bidders is essential for capturing a critical condition for information to aggregate: as the numbers of winning and losing bidders grow large, information aggregates if and only if uncertainty about the fraction of winning bidders vanishes. It may be possible for the seller to impart this information by precommitting to a specified fraction of winning bidders, via a proportional selling policy. Intuitively, this could make the proportion of winners known, and thus provide all the information that bidders need to make winner's curse corrections.     

Implementation of mechanism by processes: Public good allocation experiments

The design problem for decentralized public good provisions is outlined, hyothesized to be incomplete if the process, the informational logic of decisionreaching is left unspecified. Experiments with the incentive-compatible Deficit mechanism and two different processes, Smith and Seriatim, are reported. More failures to agree are found with the Smith process, but neither set of experiments supports a hypothesis of outcomes approximating the Pareto-efficient, Cournot-Nash equilibrium allocation. This is hypothesized to result from the failure of the Deficit mechanism to balance the budget.     

Strategic delegation and voting rules

The selection of political representatives depends on the political system. Principals, such as voters or districts, may benefit by strategically electing representatives different from themselves. While a status-quo biased delegate may be a better negotiator, an enthusiastic representative has a better chance of being included in the majority coalition. A larger majority requirement leads to “conservative” delegation and hence a status quo bias; a poor minority protection does the opposite. Through strategic delegation, the political system also determines whether centralization or decentralization is beneficial.