Revenue-superior variants of the second-price auction

Bernard Lebrun ()

Economic Theory, 2015, vol. 59, issue 2, 245-275

Abstract: With two bidders, one strong and one weak, the introduction of at least some degree of anonymous “pay-your-bid” in the payment rule of the second-price auction behoves any risk-neutral seller who, while possibly efficiency minded, cares about revenues. This can be achieved by adding to the winner’s payment a uniform proportion of his own bid, as in Güth and van Damme’s auction, or by having bidders receive a uniform proportion of the losing bid, as in Goeree and Offerman’s Amsterdam auction, or even by selling uniform toeholds to the bidders prior to the auction. We demonstrate one-to-one relations between the equilibria of these auctions and of first-price auctions. By assuming a power relation between the bidders’ value cumulative or decumulative functions, we obtain explicit expressions for the first-order effects of the pay-your-bid rule. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015

Keywords: Second-price auction; First-price auction; English auction; 2-k-price auction; Amsterdam auction; Bidder heterogeneity; D44 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s00199-014-0853-8 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to 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:spr:joecth:v:59:y:2015:i:2:p:245-275

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... eory/journal/199/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s00199-014-0853-8

Access Statistics for this article

Economic Theory is currently edited by Nichoals Yanneils

More articles in Economic Theory from Springer, Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().