Econ Papers Daily / 期刊论文
强限制竞拍者下的锦标赛拍卖
Tournament auctions with a strong limit bidder
摘要
We consider auctions with N “weak-valued” bidders and an 𝑁 + 1 -th bidder who is “strong.” The auction is a “tournament” in which the weaker players bid to win the right to compete with the strong bidder. The sealed bids of all players are binding and the winning bid of the weaker players is entered in a second-price contest with the bid of the strong player. As we already noted in Anderlini and Kim (2024a), the tournament design of the auction generates “overbidding” by the weaker bidders. This is due to the fact that the only way for a weak bidder to win the auction is to win among the weak bidders. We let the values of the strong bidder converge in distribution to an atom above the upper end of the distribution of the weak bidders. If the rest of the distribution is drained away from low values sufficiently slowly, the auction’s expected revenue is arbitrarily close to the one obtained in a Myerson (1981) optimal auction. The auction design is “detail free” — no specific knowledge of the distributions is needed in addition to the identity of the stronger bidder. No information about the actual value of the limit large atom is required. This is important since mis-calibrating by a small amount an attempt to implement the optimal auction can lead to large losses in revenue.
中文摘要
我们考虑一个包含N个“弱价值”竞标者以及一个第N+1位“强”竞标者的拍卖场景。此拍卖采用“锦标赛”形式，其中较弱的参与者竞标以争取与强竞标者竞争的权利。所有参与者的密封投标均具有约束力，而较弱参与者的获胜出价将与强竞标者的出价一同进入第二价格竞赛。正如我们在Anderlini和Kim（2024a）中已指出的，这种锦标赛式拍卖设计会导致较弱竞标者出现“过度出价”现象。这源于弱竞标者赢得拍卖的唯一途径是在弱竞标者群体中胜出。我们让强竞标者的价值在分布上收敛于一个原子，该原子位于弱竞标者价值分布的上端之上。如果分布其余部分从低价值端以足够缓慢的速度被抽离，拍卖的预期收益将任意接近Myerson（1981）最优拍卖所获得的收益。该拍卖设计是“无需细节”的——除了强竞标者的身份外，无需对分布有具体了解，也无需知晓极限大原子的实际价值。这一点至关重要，因为试图实施最优拍卖时，即使校准偏差微小，也可能导致收益大幅损失。