Full surplus extraction from colluding bidders

Daniil Larionov

No 23-029, ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research

Abstract: I consider a repeated auction setting with colluding buyers and a seller who adjusts reserve prices over time without long-term commitment. To model the seller's concern for collusion, I introduce a new equilibrium concept: collusive public perfect equilibrium. For every strategy of the seller I define the corresponding "buyer-game" in which the seller is replaced by Nature who chooses the reserve prices for the buyers in accordance with the seller's strategy. A public perfect equilibrium is collusive if the buyers cannot achieve a higher symmetric public perfect equilibrium payoff in the corresponding buyer-game. In a setting with symmetric buyers with private binary iid valuations and publicly revealed bids, I find collusive public perfect equilibria that allow the seller to extract the entire surplus from the buyers in the limit as the buyers' discount factor goes to 1. I therefore show that a non-committed seller can effectively fight collusion even when she faces patient buyers, can only set reserve prices, and has to satisfy stringent public disclosure requirements.

Date: 2023
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-cta, nep-des, nep-gth and nep-mic
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/275669/1/1857982177.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:zbw:zewdip:23029

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().