Sequential auctions of stochastically equivalent objects

Sequential Auctions with Informational Externalities and Aversion to Price Risk: Decreasing and Increasing Price Sequences

“…They include winners having the option to buy additional units (Black and de Meza, 1992), heterogeneity of objects (Bernhardt and Scoones, 1994, Engelbrecht-Wiggans, 1994, Gale and Hausch, 1994, ordering of the objects for sale by declining value (Beggs and Graddy, 1997), absentee bidders (Ginsburgh, 1998), an unknown number of objects for sale (Jeitschko, 1999), asymmetry among bidders 1 Stochastic scale e¤ects (Jeitschko and Wolfstetter, 1998) and uncertainty about the number of rounds (Feng and Chatterjee, 2005) may also generate increasing prices. (Gale and Stegeman, 2001), etc.…”

An Efficiency Ranking of Markets Aggregated from Single-Object Auctions

“…That is, in our setting, an appropriately designed collection of single-object auctions generates nearly the same social surplus as would a more complicated but fully efficient combinatorial auction, such as Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG). 1 We begin by extending existing sequential auction theory (Engelbrecht-Wiggans 1994, Milgrom & Weber 2000 to characterize the equilibrium of the sequential auction with future objects revealed. Our model is simple: n bidders participate in a sequence of two second-price sealed-bid auctions.…”

“…Our first efficiency result shows that revealing future objects increases the ex-ante expected efficiency of the sequence of auctions. Specifically, we compare the sequential auction with future objects revealed to a sequential auction with future objects hidden, first analyzed by Engelbrecht-Wiggans (1994).…”

“…Perhaps the starkest example of an auction with future objects hidden is that described by Engelbrecht-Wiggans (1994), in which future items in an equipment auction are hidden behind a curtain until their turn for sale. The field experiment reported by Tadelis and Zettlemeyer (2011) relates to improving the disclosure of information about objects in the sequence, specifically releasing more information about automobiles' quality condition.…”

Bidding at Sequential First-price Auctions with(out) Supply Uncertainty: A Laboratory Analysis

“…We consider the benchmark model for sequential auctions of Milgrom and Weber (1982) that assumes private-independent values and unit-demands. A well-known result of this model is that if k identical units are sold one after the other to n risk neutral bidders, then the resulting series of expected prices is constant if buyers are certain about k. A large body of subsequent research on sequential auctions stems from Ashenfelter's (1989) observation of a 'declining price anomaly' at wine auctions, and has characterized conditions on buyers ' preferences (e.g., von der Fehr, 1994, Engelbrecht-Wiggans, 1994, Bernhardt and Scoones, 1994, Ginsburgh, 1998 or on market specifics to observe deviations from the Lawof-One-Price (e.g., Ashenfelter and Genesove, 1990, Black and De Meza, 1992, Menezes, 1993, Gale and Hausch, 1994, Beggs and Graddy, 1995, Gandal, 1998, Katzman, 1999. McAfee and Vincent (1993) show that for the benchmark model of Milgrom and Weber (1982), expected prices would decline and an efficient allocation of goods can be guaranteed only if buyers display non-decreasing absolute risk averse (NDARA) preferences, which is not considered to be a plausible assumption for real-world behavior.…”