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Auction theory is a branch of applied economics that deals with how bidders act in auctions and researches how the features of auctions incentivise predictable outcomes. Auction theory is a tool used to inform the design of real-world auctions. Sellers use auction theory to raise higher revenues while allowing buyers to procure at a lower cost.
A classic example is the pair of auction mechanisms: first price auction and second price auction. First-price auction has a variant which is Bayesian-Nash incentive compatible; second-price auction is dominant-strategy-incentive-compatible, which is even stronger than Bayesian-Nash incentive compatible. The two mechanisms fulfill the ...
However, each bidder has a different guess about how many quarters are in the jar. Other, real-life examples include Treasury bill auctions, initial public offerings, spectrum auctions, very prized paintings, art pieces, antiques etc. One important phenomenon occurring in common value auctions is the winner's curse. Bidders have only estimates ...
The most straightforward form of an all-pay auction is a Tullock auction, sometimes called a Tullock lottery after Gordon Tullock, in which everyone submits a bid but both the losers and the winners pay their submitted bids. [5] This is instrumental in describing certain ideas in public choice economics. [citation needed]
The branch of economic theory dealing with auction types and participants' behavior in auctions is called auction theory. The open ascending price auction is arguably the most common form of auction and has been used throughout history. [1] Participants bid openly against one another, with each subsequent bid being higher than the previous bid. [2]
Early research on auctions focused on two special cases: common value auctions in which buyers have private signals of an items true value and private value auctions in which values are identically and independently distributed. Milgrom and Weber (1982) present a much more general theory of auctions with positively related values.
Since most auctions involve at least some amount of common value, and some degree of uncertainty about that common value, the winner's curse is an important phenomenon. In the 1950s, when the term winner's curse was first coined, there was no accurate method to estimate the potential value of an offshore oil field .
A VCG mechanism can also be used in a double auction. It is the most general form of incentive-compatible double-auction since it can handle a combinatorial auction with arbitrary value functions on bundles. Unfortunately, it is not budget-balanced: the total value paid by the buyers is smaller than the total value received by the sellers.