A profit-maximizing auctioneer can provide a public good to at most one of a number of groups of agents. The groups may have non-empty intersections. Each group member has a private value for the good being provided to the group. We investigate an auction mechanism where the auctioneer provides the good to the group with the highest sum of the agentsÕ bids, only if this sum exceeds a minimum price declared previously by the auctioneer. For the one-group two-bidder case with private values drawn from a uniform distribution we characterize the continuously differentiable symmetric equilibrium bidding functions for the agents, and find the optimal minimum price for the auctioneer when such functions are used by the bidders. We also examine another interesting family of equilibrium bidding functions for this case. with a discrete number of possible bids, and show the relation (in the limit) to the differentiable bidding functions
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Paper provided by Université catholique de Louvain, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE) in its series CORE Discussion Papers with number
1997077.
Find related papers by JEL classification: C00 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - General - - - General C72 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory - - - Noncooperative Games D44 - Microeconomics - - Market Structure and Pricing - - - Auctions D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information H41 - Public Economics - - Publicly Provided Goods - - - Public Goods
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McAfee, R Preston & McMillan, John, 1992.
"Bidding Rings,"
American Economic Review,
American Economic Association, vol. 82(3), pages 579-99, June.
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McAfee, R. Preston & McMillan, John., 1990.
"Bidding Rings,"
Working Papers
726, California Institute of Technology, Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences.
[Downloadable!]