Optimality and Robustness of the English Auction

Giuseppe (Pino) Lopomo

Working Papers from New York University, Leonard N. Stern School of Business, Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper attempts to reconcile the observed popularity of the English auction with the hypothesis that the trading mechanism is chosen with the objective of maximizing the seller's expected revenue. Under the assumptions of Milgrom and Weber's [20] 'general symmetric model,' I show the following three results. First, the 'augumented' English auction, in which the auctioneer sets the reserve price after all but one bidder have dropped out, generates at least as much seller's expected revenue as any ex post incentive-compatible (EPIC) and individually rational (EPIR) direct mechanisms. EPIC and EPIR direct mechanisms correspond to "belief-free" selling procedures. Thus this restriction of the set of feasible selling mechanisms aims at capturing a notion of robustness with respect to pertubations of the buyers' beliefs about their opponents' private information. Second, in the larger set of mechanisms, characterized by the property that 'losers do not pay,' ther! e exist auctions that generate a higher seller's expected revenue than the (augmented) English auction. Third, with two buyers, for a large class of signals' distributions, the augmented English auction maximizes the seller's expected revenue among all selling procedures where the loser does not pay and each buyer's payment is nondecreaseing in his own signal. With private values, these two conditions are satisfied by many equilibria in a class of bidding mechanisms, which includes approximations of both the Dutch auction and the English auction with discrete price increments. With more than two buyers, the English auction is optmal among all ex post efficient mechanisms where the losers do not pay and each buyer's payment is monotone in his signal.

Date: 1995-10
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
Journal Article: Optimality and Robustness of the English Auction (2001)
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:ste:nystbu:95-03

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from New York University, Leonard N. Stern School of Business, Department of Economics New York University, Leonard N. Stern School of Business, Department of Economics, 44 West 4th Street, New York, NY 10012-1126. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Amanda Murphy ().