Empirical Analysis of Auctions

由于拍卖是现代经济理论中占主导地位的博弈论分析最有说服力的市场制度之一，拍卖数据为评估建模方法和评估理论预测的战略行为在实践中的重要性提供了重要机会。拍卖在公共资源配置中也发挥着越来越重要的作用，因此，有效配置和创收的目标为理解拍卖提供了强有力的政策动机。该项目由四个部分组成，通过对拍卖市场的实证研究和开发新的拍卖分析统计工具，促进对这一问题的理解。 第一个组成部分解决的需求估计在拍卖中，卖方使用保留价。 通过利用由卖方估值的异质性导致的保留价格的变化，人们可以一致地估计标准拍卖中的需求特征的完整分布-广泛的政策模拟所需的模型原语。 这是没有参数分布的假设。第二个组成部分地址的推断出价在英国拍卖中，投标人可能是不对称的或有相关的估值。这也允许投标人，而不是计量经济学家，观察到一个共同的因素改变他们的私人价值观的环境-在应用程序中的常见情况。第三个组成部分开发非参数检验的共同价值在第一价格拍卖。利用最近的进展，在拍卖的计量经济学，我们展示了如何可以使用的投标人的数量的变化来测试赢家的诅咒的存在，因此，共同的价值观。第四个也是最后一个项目研究了一个在线拍卖市场，许多买家和卖家交易一个同质的对象。它解决了拍卖规则，卖方声誉和其他拍卖特征对投标人参与和出价的影响。套利行为的记录，和欺诈性卖方行为的流行和预测进行了研究。

Because auctions are among the market institutions most convincingly captured by the kind of game theoretic analysis that dominates modern economic theory, auction data provide important opportunities to evaluate modeling approaches and assess the importance in practice of strategic behavior predicted by theory. Auctions also play an increasingly important role in the allocation of public resources, so goals of efficient allocation and revenue generation provide strong policy motivations for understanding auctions. This project consists of four components that contribute to this understanding through empirical studies of auction markets and development of new statistical tools for analysis of auctions. The first component addresses estimation of demand at auctions in which sellers use reserve prices. By exploiting variation in the reserve prices that results from heterogeneity in seller valuations, one can consistently estimate the full distribution characterizing demand at standard auctions---the model primitive needed for a wide range of policy simulations. This is done without parametric distributional assumptions.The second component addresses inference from bids at English auctions in which bidders may be asymmetric or have correlated valuations. This allows also environments in which bidders, but not the econometrician, observe a common factor shifting their private values---a common situation in applications. The third component develops nonparametric tests for common values at first-price auctions. Exploiting recent advancements in the econometrics of auctions, we show how one can use variation in the number of bidders to test for the presence of the winner's curse and, therefore, common values. The fourth and final project studies an online auction market with many buyers and sellers trading a homogeneous object. It addresses the effects of auction rules, seller reputation and other auction characteristics on bidder participation and bids. Arbitrage behavior is documented, and the prevalence and predictors of fraudulent seller behavior are studied.