IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/soceco/v41y2012i4p434-438.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

It is not just escalation: The one dollar game revisited

Author

Listed:
  • Migheli, Matteo

Abstract

This paper examines the one-dollar auction game ruling out escalation. The aim of the paper is to understand if players’ expectations about competitors’ moves are strong enough to induce at least one player to bid more than the auctioned euro. Any other bid represents an expected loss for the bidder, so he maximises his own payoff by choosing a bid, which produces a null expected payoff. The empirical results and the analysis based on them support theoretical findings. It is possible that the winner pays more than €1 to get €1 because of his expectations about competitors’ bids and because of his indifference over a certain interval. The results are symptoms of some risk aversion. In an English auction escalation leads to this result, but when escalation is ruled out, expectations and indifference of preferences can lead to the same result.

Suggested Citation

  • Migheli, Matteo, 2012. "It is not just escalation: The one dollar game revisited," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 41(4), pages 434-438.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:soceco:v:41:y:2012:i:4:p:434-438
    DOI: 10.1016/j.socec.2011.05.012
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053535711000734
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.socec.2011.05.012?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Maskin, Eric & Riley, John, 2003. "Uniqueness of equilibrium in sealed high-bid auctions," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 45(2), pages 395-409, November.
    2. Barry O'neill, 1986. "International Escalation and the Dollar Auction," Journal of Conflict Resolution, Peace Science Society (International), vol. 30(1), pages 33-50, March.
    3. Bahar Leventoğlu & Branislav L. Slantchev, 2007. "The Armed Peace: A Punctuated Equilibrium Theory of War," American Journal of Political Science, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 51(4), pages 755-771, October.
    4. Krishna, Vijay & Morgan, John, 1997. "An Analysis of the War of Attrition and the All-Pay Auction," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 72(2), pages 343-362, February.
    5. Martin Shubik, 1971. "The Dollar Auction game: a paradox in noncooperative behavior and escalation," Journal of Conflict Resolution, Peace Science Society (International), vol. 15(1), pages 109-111, March.
    6. Milgrom, Paul R & Weber, Robert J, 1982. "A Theory of Auctions and Competitive Bidding," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 50(5), pages 1089-1122, September.
    7. Wolfgang Leininger, 1989. "Escalation and Cooperation in Conflict Situations," Journal of Conflict Resolution, Peace Science Society (International), vol. 33(2), pages 231-254, June.
    8. Ku, Gillian & Malhotra, Deepak & Murnighan, J. Keith, 2005. "Towards a competitive arousal model of decision-making: A study of auction fever in live and Internet auctions," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 96(2), pages 89-103, March.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Andrea Morone & Simone Nuzzo & Rocco Caferra, 2019. "The Dollar Auction Game: A Laboratory Comparison Between Individuals and Groups," Group Decision and Negotiation, Springer, vol. 28(1), pages 79-98, February.
    2. Matteo Migheli, 2017. "The winner’s curse in auctions with losses," Mind & Society: Cognitive Studies in Economics and Social Sciences, Springer;Fondazione Rosselli, vol. 16(1), pages 113-126, November.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Alcalde, José & Dahm, Matthias, 2008. "The Complete Information First. Price Auction or the Importance of Being Indivisible," Working Papers 2072/13264, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Department of Economics.
    2. Lorentziadis, Panos L., 2016. "Optimal bidding in auctions from a game theory perspective," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 248(2), pages 347-371.
    3. Kotowski, Maciej H. & Li, Fei, 2014. "On the continuous equilibria of affiliated-value, all-pay auctions with private budget constraints," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 85(C), pages 84-108.
    4. Rittwik Chatterjee, 2013. "A Brief Survey of the Theory of Auction," South Asian Journal of Macroeconomics and Public Finance, , vol. 2(2), pages 169-191, December.
    5. Rasmusen Eric Bennett, 2006. "Strategic Implications of Uncertainty over One's Own Private Value in Auctions," The B.E. Journal of Theoretical Economics, De Gruyter, vol. 6(1), pages 1-22, November.
    6. Chi, Chang Koo & Murto, Pauli & Valimaki, Juuso, 2017. "All-Pay Auctions with Affiliated Values," MPRA Paper 80799, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    7. Matteo Migheli, 2017. "The winner’s curse in auctions with losses," Mind & Society: Cognitive Studies in Economics and Social Sciences, Springer;Fondazione Rosselli, vol. 16(1), pages 113-126, November.
    8. Hu, Audrey & Offerman, Theo & Zou, Liang, 2011. "Premium auctions and risk preferences," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 146(6), pages 2420-2439.
    9. Giuseppe Lopomo, 2004. "Optimality and Robustness of the English Auction," Levine's Bibliography 122247000000000391, UCLA Department of Economics.
    10. Adam, Marc T.P. & Krämer, Jan & Müller, Marius B., 2015. "Auction Fever! How Time Pressure and Social Competition Affect Bidders’ Arousal and Bids in Retail Auctions," Journal of Retailing, Elsevier, vol. 91(3), pages 468-485.
    11. Ezra Einy & Ori Haimanko & Ram Orzach & Aner Sela, 2014. "Common-Value All-Pay Auctions with Asymmetric Information and Bid Caps," Working Papers 1402, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Department of Economics.
    12. Bos, Olivier, 2012. "Wars of attrition and all-pay auctions with stochastic competition," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 48(2), pages 83-91.
    13. Prokopovych, Pavlo & Yannelis, Nicholas C., 2023. "On monotone pure-strategy Bayesian-Nash equilibria of a generalized contest," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 140(C), pages 348-362.
    14. Kotowski, Maciej H. & Li, Fei, 2014. "The war of attrition and the revelation of valuable information," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 124(3), pages 420-423.
    15. Péter Esö & Lucy White, 2004. "Precautionary Bidding in Auctions," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 72(1), pages 77-92, January.
    16. Cramton, Peter C, 1995. "Money Out of Thin Air: The Nationwide Narrowband PCS Auction," Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 4(2), pages 267-343, Summer.
    17. Diego Aycinena & Rimvydas Baltaduonis & Lucas Rentschler, 2019. "Valuation structure in incomplete information contests: experimental evidence," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 179(3), pages 195-208, June.
    18. Sui, Yong, 2006. "All-pay auctions with resale," MPRA Paper 11463, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised Oct 2007.
    19. Reynolds, Kristy E. & Gilkeson, James H. & Niedrich, Ronald W., 2009. "The influence of seller strategy on the winning price in online auctions: A moderated mediation model," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 62(1), pages 22-30, January.
    20. Pycia, Marek & Woodward, Kyle, 2021. "Auctions of Homogeneous Goods: A Case for Pay-as-Bid," CEPR Discussion Papers 15656, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    One-dollar game; Sealed auction; Rationality; Experiment;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C72 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory - - - Noncooperative Games
    • C93 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Field Experiments
    • D03 - Microeconomics - - General - - - Behavioral Microeconomics: Underlying Principles

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:soceco:v:41:y:2012:i:4:p:434-438. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/inca/620175 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.