Bidding in first-price and second-price interdependent-values auctions: A laboratory experiment

Theodore Turocy and Timothy Cason

No 15-23, Working Paper series, University of East Anglia, Centre for Behavioural and Experimental Social Science (CBESS) from School of Economics, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK.

Abstract: We report a laboratory experiment on first-price and second-price auctions in settings with independent signals and interdependent values. The environment includes independent private values and the common-value "wallet game" as limiting cases. We manipulate the degree of interdependence of values across sessions, while maintaining the same Bayes-Nash equilibrium bidding function. In contrast, cursed equilibrium predicts bids will be raised for lower signals. We find some support for cursed equilibrium, in that bids change as the degree of value interdependence changes. Contrary to both Bayes-Nash and cursed equilibrium, auction revenues are largest for intermediate levels of interdependence. We construct a model combining cursedness with an underweighting of the opportunity costs of higher bids, and find substantial bidder heterogeneity. A majority of bidders are either fully cursed and disregard completely the bad news that winning the auction entails, or are not cursed at all. We also find evidence for some systematic procedural differences in bidding between first-price and second-price auctions.

Keywords: auctions; affiliated values; winner's curse; wallet game; experiments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D44 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-12-18
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-gth
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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