Competing first-price and second-price auctions

J.M.J. Delnoij and Kris De Jaegher

No 16-07, Working Papers from Utrecht School of Economics

Abstract: This paper theoretically investigates which auctions competing sellers select when they can choose between first-price and second-price auctions, and when risk averse bidders endogenously enter one of the auctions. We first consider bidders’ entry decisions between exogenously given auctions, and find that there exists a symmetric entry equilibrium that is characterized by a mixed strategy, which depends on the bidders’ degree of absolute risk aversion. In a next step, we endogenize the sellers’ choice of auctions. We show that competing sellers have a dominant strategy to select first-price auctions if bidders exhibit nondecreasing absolute risk aversion. If bidders exhibit decreasing absolute risk aversion, however, other equilibria exist in which sellers select second-price auctions as well.

Keywords: Auctions; Entry decisions; Risk aversion (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gth and nep-mic
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://dspace.library.uu.nl/bitstream/handle/1874/347979/16_07.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:use:tkiwps:1607

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Utrecht School of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Marina Muilwijk ().