IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/wrk/warwec/845.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Auctions in which Losers Set the Price

Author

Listed:
  • Mezzetti, Claudio

    (Department of Economics, University of Warwick)

  • Tsetlin, Ilia

    (INSEAD, Singaport)

Abstract

We study auctions of a single asset among symmetric bidders with affiliated values. We show that the second-price auction minimizes revenue among all efficient auction mechanisms in which only the winner pays, and the price only depends on the losers' bids. In particular, we show that the k-th price auction generates higher revenue than the second-price auction, for all k > 2. If rationing is allowed, with shares of the asset rationed among the t highest bidders, then the (t + 1)-st price auction yields the lowest revenue among all auctions with rationing in which only the winners pay and the unit price only depends on the losers' bids. Finally, we compute bidding functions and revenue of the k-th price auction, with and without rationing, for an illustrative example much used in the experimental literature to study first-price, second-price and English auctions.

Suggested Citation

  • Mezzetti, Claudio & Tsetlin, Ilia, 2008. "Auctions in which Losers Set the Price," The Warwick Economics Research Paper Series (TWERPS) 845, University of Warwick, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:wrk:warwec:845
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/workingpapers/2008/twerp_845.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Jeremy Bulow & Paul Klemperer, 2002. "Prices and the Winner's Curse," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 33(1), pages 1-21, Spring.
    2. Michael H. Rothkopf, 2007. "Thirteen Reasons Why the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves Process Is Not Practical," Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 55(2), pages 191-197, April.
    3. Dirk Bergemann & Stephen Morris, 2012. "Robust Mechanism Design," World Scientific Book Chapters, in: Robust Mechanism Design The Role of Private Information and Higher Order Beliefs, chapter 2, pages 49-96, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd..
    4. Christine A. Parlour & Uday Rajan, 2005. "Rationing in IPOs," Review of Finance, European Finance Association, vol. 9(1), pages 33-63.
    5. Milgrom, Paul R & Weber, Robert J, 1982. "A Theory of Auctions and Competitive Bidding," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 50(5), pages 1089-1122, September.
    6. Milgrom, Paul R, 1981. "Rational Expectations, Information Acquisition, and Competitive Bidding," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 49(4), pages 921-943, June.
    7. Paul Klemperer, 2004. "Auctions: Theory and Practice," Online economics textbooks, SUNY-Oswego, Department of Economics, number auction1.
    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. Olga Gorelkina, 2014. "Bidder Collusion and the Auction with Target Bids," Discussion Paper Series of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods 2014_10, Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods.
    2. Mares Vlad & Shor Mikhael, 2012. "On the Competitive Effects of Bidding Syndicates," The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, De Gruyter, vol. 12(1), pages 1-33, September.

    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. 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.
    2. Ning Sun & Zaifu Yang, 2014. "An Efficient and Incentive Compatible Dynamic Auction for Multiple Complements," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 122(2), pages 422-466.
    3. Elbittar, Alexander, 2009. "Impact of valuation ranking information on bidding in first-price auctions: A laboratory study," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 69(1), pages 75-85, January.
    4. Kaplan, Todd R. & Zamir, Shmuel, 2015. "Advances in Auctions," Handbook of Game Theory with Economic Applications,, Elsevier.
    5. Habib, Michel A. & Ziegler, Alexandre, 2007. "Why government bonds are sold by auction and corporate bonds by posted-price selling," Journal of Financial Intermediation, Elsevier, vol. 16(3), pages 343-367, July.
    6. Satoru Fujishige & Zaifu Yang, 2020. "A Universal Dynamic Auction for Unimodular Demand Types: An Efficient Auction Design for Various Kinds of Indivisible Commodities," Discussion Papers 20/08, Department of Economics, University of York.
    7. Li, Zhen & Kuo, Ching-Chung, 2011. "Revenue-maximizing Dutch auctions with discrete bid levels," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 215(3), pages 721-729, December.
    8. Emiel Maasland & Sander Onderstal, 2006. "Going, Going, Gone! A Swift Tour of Auction Theory and its Applications," De Economist, Springer, vol. 154(2), pages 197-249, June.
    9. Committee, Nobel Prize, 2020. "Improvements to auction theory and inventions of new auction formats," Nobel Prize in Economics documents 2020-2, Nobel Prize Committee.
    10. Li, Yunan, 2017. "Approximation in mechanism design with interdependent values," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 103(C), pages 225-253.
    11. Peter Cramton & Yoav Shoham & Richard Steinberg, 2007. "An Overview of Combinatorial Auctions," Papers of Peter Cramton 07oca, University of Maryland, Department of Economics - Peter Cramton, revised 2007.
    12. Akiyoshi Shioura & Zaifu Yang, 2013. "Equilibrium, Auction, Multiple Substitutes and Complements," Discussion Papers 13/17, Department of Economics, University of York.
    13. Boeheim, Rene & Zulehner, Christine, 1996. "Auctions - A Survey," Economics Series 39, Institute for Advanced Studies.
    14. Ronald M. Harstad, 2007. "Does a Seller Really Want Another Bidder?," Working Papers 0711, Department of Economics, University of Missouri.
    15. Jeremy Bulow & Paul Klemperer, 2007. "When are Auctions Best?," Economics Papers 2007-W03, Economics Group, Nuffield College, University of Oxford.
    16. Philippe Jehiel & Laurent Lamy, 2020. "On the Benefits of Set-Asides," Journal of the European Economic Association, European Economic Association, vol. 18(4), pages 1655-1696.
    17. Condorelli, Daniele, 2013. "Market and non-market mechanisms for the optimal allocation of scarce resources," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 82(C), pages 582-591.
    18. Peter M. DeMarzo & Ilan Kremer & Andrzej Skrzypacz, 2005. "Bidding with Securities: Auctions and Security Design," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 95(4), pages 936-959, September.
    19. Parlour, Christine A. & Prasnikar, Vesna & Rajan, Uday, 2007. "Compensating for the winner's curse: Experimental evidence," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 60(2), pages 339-356, August.
    20. repec:dau:papers:123456789/7891 is not listed on IDEAS
    21. Paul Klemperer, 2007. "Bidding Markets," Journal of Competition Law and Economics, Oxford University Press, vol. 3(1), pages 1-47.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Auctions ; Second-Price Auction ; English Auction ; k-th Price Auction ; Affiliated Values ; Rationing ; Robust Mechanism Design;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D44 - Microeconomics - - Market Structure, Pricing, and Design - - - Auctions
    • D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:wrk:warwec:845. 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: Margaret Nash (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/dewaruk.html .

    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.