Suchergebnisse

We analyse procurement auctions in which sellers are distinguished on the basis of the ratios of quality per unit of money that they offer. Sellers are privately informed on the offered quality of the technology or good. We assume that the procurer cannot perfectly identify the best offer. Thus, with positive and decreasing probability, the second, third, etc. best ratio offered is selected as the winner of the auction. We model the decision process as based on a general noisy ranking of offers. We show that, although the problem seems to be analytically intractable in general, there exists a simple symmetric, pure-strategy equilibrium in which everyone follows the simple heuristic to match the same "focal" price-quality ratio.

This report discusses auction-rate securities (ARSs), which most are long-term bonds, although some ARS are structured as preferred shares and so have no maturities.

Motivated by the new auction format in the England and Wales electricity market, as well as the recent debate in California, we characterize bidding behavior and market outcomes in uniform and discriminatory electricity auctions. Uniform auctions result in higher average prices than discriminatory auctions, but the ranking in terms of productive efficiency is ambiguous. The comparative effects of other market design features, such as the number of steps in suppliers' bid functions, the duration of bids, and the elasticity of demand are analyzed. We also consider the relationship between market structure and market performance in the two auction formats.

Auctions are considered with a (non-symmetric) independent-private-value model of valuations. It shall be demonstrated that a utility equivalence principle holds for an agent if and only if she has constant absolute risk aversion.

We analyze the price structure of sequential auctions of modern and contemporary art that took place in Italy during the period 1983-96. Contrary to previous empirical studies, we do not find any "afternoon" effect - i.e., a decline of auction prices relative to their estimates.If anything, we find the opposite, or "morning", effect. Our results are robust to different econometric specifications. Taking into consideration the possible dynamic nature of price determination, we propose an interpretation of the empirical results that encompasses previous contributions.