Auction Competitive Dynamics and Guide (List) Prices in a Bubble Market

Abstract

The auction literature finds that competition drives price outcomes and has both rational and psychological components. In bubble markets, emotional factors are heightened, potentially impacting on the interaction between the strategic setting of guide prices by auctioneers, competitive bidding and final auction price outcomes, themes not explored in the extant literature. In a real estate bubble, we find evidence that auction prices anchor on guide prices and that any emotional impact on competitive bidding associated with auction fever does not occlude the assimilative role for the guide price as an anchor. Interestingly, however, we find evidence consistent with real estate agents systematically setting guide prices at deep discounts relative to fundamentals, prima facie consistent with a belief in the reversal-of-the-anchoring effect, suggesting their actions may, paradoxically, dampen the effect of the bubble rather than amplify it.