Discrimination via Symmetric Auctions

Rahul Deb and Mallesh M. Pai

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, 2017, vol. 9, issue 1, 275-314

Abstract: Discrimination (for instance, along the lines of race or gender) is often prohibited in auctions. This is legally enforced by preventing the seller from explicitly biasing the rules in favor of bidders from certain groups (for example, by subsidizing their bids). In this paper, we study the efficacy of this policy in the context of a single object: independent private value setting with heterogeneous bidders. We show that restricting the seller to using an anonymous, sealed bid auction format (or, simply, a symmetric auction) imposes virtually no restriction on her ability to discriminate. Our results highlight that the discrepancy between the superficial impartiality of the auction rules and the resulting fairness of the outcome can be extreme.

JEL-codes: D44 D82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
Note: DOI: 10.1257/mic.20150121
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mic.20150121 (application/pdf)
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles/attachments?retrie ... MRJvwfp9kgkTrCdro3XC (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to AEA members and institutional subscribers.

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:aea:aejmic:v:9:y:2017:i:1:p:275-314

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.aeaweb.org/journals/subscriptions

Access Statistics for this article

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics is currently edited by Johannes Hörner

More articles in American Economic Journal: Microeconomics from American Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Michael P. Albert ().