Collaborative Research: In Experimental Studies of Auction Markets

这个项目包括三个部分。第一部分涉及共同价值(矿业权)拍卖中的学习过程。在这些拍卖中，缺乏经验的竞拍者遭受着赢家的诅咒，他们赚取了负利润，出价高于预期价值，但条件是中标。有经验的投标人适应了逆向选择的力量，最终获得了正利润。问题是受试者到底在学什么。他们只是在学习减少对任何给定环境的竞价，是对获胜导致亏损的反应，还是学习理解逆向选择力量，这将表明他们具有在不同环境中推广的能力。这项研究对理解矿业权拍卖中的竞价行为具有实际意义，也与最近经济学中学习过程的理论兴趣相吻合。第二部分研究私人价值双向拍卖。双向拍卖机制理论分析的最新进展集中在单次拍卖上，在这种拍卖中，交易者的估值是从结构已知的分布中随机抽取的，交易者对单个消费单位的需求或供应是无弹性的，保留价是私下知道的。对特定交易规则进行详细博弈论研究的动机是精确地阐述交易规则和每个交易者使用其私人信息的战略行为是如何结合在一起来确定基本上反映所有支付信息的交易条件的。在这个项目中，对这些交易规则的实验研究旨在确定这些预测的行为稳健性。这些研究很重要，因为双重拍卖是市场经济的基本交易环境。最后一部分是关于激励合同拍卖的实验和实地研究。激励合同使支付既依赖于投标，又依赖于实现成本。如果已实现的成本超过公司的出价，公司应对成本超支的某些界限负责；如果公司成功地将其成本控制在出价以下，则允许其部分成本低于出价。奖励合同在国防部武器采购中具有相当大的潜在实际重要性，通常用于建筑业，作为固定价格投标合同的替代办法。此外，纳什均衡竞价理论对激励合同做出了几个清晰而新颖的预测，这些预测尚未得到系统的研究。

There are three parts in this project. The first part deals with learning processes in common value (mineral rights) auctions. Inexperienced bidders in these auctions suffer from the winner's curse, earning negative profits and bidding above the expected value conditional on winning the item. Experience bidders adjust to the adverse selection forces, eventually earning positive profits. The question is exactly what it is that subjects are learning. Are they simply learning to bid less for any given environment, a reaction to losing money as a consequence of winning, or learning to understand the adverse selection forces, which would indicate some ability to generalize across environments. The research has practical implications for understanding bidding behavior in mineral rights auctions and coincides with recent theoretical interest in learning processes in economics as well. The second part studies private value double auctions. Recent developments in theoretical analyses of double auction mechanisms have concentrated on single shot auctions in which traders' valuations are drawn randomly from distributions whose structure is common knowledge, and in which traders have inelastic demands or supplies for a single unit of consumption at a reservation price that is privately known. The motivation for detailed game theoretical studies of particular trading rules is to elaborate precisely how trading rules and each trader's strategic behavior using his private information combine to determine terms of trade that reflect substantially all the disbursed information. In this project, the experimental investigation of these trading rules is designed to determine the behavioral robustness of these predictions. These studies are important since double auctions are a fundamental trading environment for market economies. The last part deals with experimental and field studies of auctions with incentive contracts. Incentive contracts make the payment depend both on the bid and the realized cost. If realized cost exceeds the firm's bid, the firm is responsible for some farction of the cost overrun; if the firm succeeds in keeping its cost below its bid, it is reqarded by being allowed to keep part of the cost underrun. Incentive contracts are of considerable potential practical importance in Department of Defense weapons acquisition and are commonly employed in the construction industry as an alternative to fixed price bid contracts. Further, Nash equilibrium bidding theory makes several clear and novel predictions for incentive contracts that have yet to be subject to systematic study.