We investigate equilibria of sealed-bid second price auctions with bidder participation costs in the independent private values environment. We focus on equilibria in which bidders use cut-off strategies (bid the valuation if it is greater than a certain cut-off point, otherwise do not participate), since if a bidder finds participating optimal, she cannot do better than bidding her valuation. When the bidders are symmetric, the concavity (respectively, strict convexity) of the c.d.f. from which the valuations are drawn is a sufficient condition for uniqueness (respectively, multiplicity) within this class. We also study a special case with asymmetric bidders and show that concavity/convexity plays a similar role.
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Paper provided by Microeconomics.ca Website in its series Micro Theory Working Papers with number
tan-04-01-24-10-08-06.
Find related papers by JEL classification: C62 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Mathematical Methods and Programming - - - Existence and Stability Conditions of Equilibrium 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
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Andreas Blume & Paul Heidhues & Jonathan Lafky & Johannes Münster & Meixia Zhang, 2006.
"All Nash Equilibria of the Multi-Unit Vickrey Auction,"
Discussion Papers
116, SFB/TR 15 Governance and the Efficiency of Economic Systems, Free University of Berlin, Humboldt University of Berlin, University of Bonn, University of Mannheim, University of Munich.
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