First Price Auctions with General Information Structures: Implications for Bidding and Revenue
59 Pages Posted: 11 Aug 2015 Last revised: 2 Oct 2016
There are 7 versions of this paper
First Price Auctions with General Information Structures: Implications for Bidding and Revenue
First Price Auctions with General Information Structures: Implications for Bidding and Revenue
First Price Auctions with General Information Structures: Implications for Bidding and Revenue
First Price Auctions with General Information Structures: Implications for Bidding and Revenue
First Price Auctions with General Information Structures: Implications for Bidding and Revenue
First Price Auctions with General Information Structures: Implications for Bidding and Revenue
First Price Auctions with General Information Structures: Implications for Bidding and Revenue
Date Written: September 17, 2016
Abstract
We explore the impact of private information in sealed-bid first-price auctions. For a given symmetric and arbitrarily correlated prior distribution over values, we characterize the lowest winning-bid distribution that can arise across all information structures and equilibria. The information and equilibrium attaining this minimum leave bidders indifferent between their equilibrium bids and all higher bids. Our results provide lower bounds for bids and revenue with asymmetric distributions over values. We also report further characterizations of revenue and bidder surplus including upper bounds on revenue. Our work has implications for the identification of value distributions from data on winning bids and for the informationally robust comparison of alternative bidding mechanisms.
Keywords: First price auction, information structure, Bayes correlated equilibrium, private values, interdependent values, common values, revenue, surplus, welfare bounds, reserve price, entry fee
JEL Classification: C72, D44, D82, D83
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation