Experimental and Theoretical Investigations of Auctions

拍卖在经济学中具有越来越重要的实践和理论意义。最近拍卖政府资产的应用取得了惊人的成功：在联邦通信委员会（FCC）的领导下，美国政府在1994年7月至2000年7月期间出售了10,000多个无线电波版权，共筹集了239亿美元。更引人注目的是，在2000年4月结束的一次拍卖中，英国政府通过出售“第三代”移动电话牌照筹集了225亿英镑（合355.3亿美元）。因此，拍卖既能增加卖方收入，又能更有效地分配资产（将资产交付给最看重资产的买家）。此外，拍卖在交换理论中扮演着重要的角色，因为在没有中间做市商的情况下，拍卖仍然是最简单、最熟悉的价格决定手段之一。它们是有价值的例证，也是博弈论（战略互动）最突出的应用之一，在这种情况下，代理人拥有私人信息（即，竞争代理人不知道的信息）。尽管取得了这些成功，但关于最佳拍卖设计仍存在许多悬而未决的问题。该研究将涉及拍卖设计中一些开放问题的理论和实验研究。这些包括：1；比较多种形式的多对象维克里拍卖的效率，至少在理论上，当其他拍卖结构无法做到这一点时，维克里拍卖结构可以提供100%的效率。过去的研究表明，拍卖设计的细节可以使竞标者更容易接近100%的效率目标。我们将继续研究这些问题。调查其他拍卖形式，以应对一个或多个竞标者对拍卖物品的出价略高于竞争对手的情况。在这种情况下，有优势的竞标者（即使这种优势非常小）往往会吓跑竞争对手，这可能导致有关物品的销售价格不必要地降低。替代拍卖形式有望帮助缓解这一问题。3. 调查在拍卖项目之间存在协同效应或互补性的多单位需求拍卖。这样的拍卖在实现有效的拍卖结果方面产生了许多问题。4. 了解团队投标的效果，而不是单个投标人。过去的大多数拍卖实验都集中在后者，而在许多现实世界中，竞标是在团队中进行的。

Auctions are of growing practical and theoretical importance in economics. Recent applications of auctions to sales of government assets have had spectacular success: Led by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the U. S. government has conducted a number of sales of air wave rights raising a total of $23.9 billion in selling over 10,000 licenses between July 1994 and July 2000. Even more spectacular, in an auction ending in April 2000, the British government raised 22.5 billion pounds ($35.53 billion) from the sale of "third generation" mobile phone licenses. Thus, auctions promise to both increase seller revenue and lead to more efficient allocation of assets (delivering assets to the buyers who value them the most). Further, auctions play a prominent role in the theory of exchange as they remain one of the simplest and most familiar means of price determination in the absence of intermediate market makers. And they serve as valuable illustrations, and one of the most prominent applications, of the theory of games (strategic interactions) in cases where agents possess private information (i.e., information which rival agents are not privy to). In spite of these successes there remain a number of open questions regarding optimal auction design. The research will involve both theoretical and experimental studies of a number of open questions in auction design. These include: 1. Comparing the efficiency of alternative forms of the multi-object Vickrey auction, an auction structure which, in theory at least, can deliver 100% efficiency when alternative auction structures fail to do so. What past research has shown is that the details of the auction design canmake it easier for bidders to approach the 100% efficiency goal. We will continue our study of these issues.2. Investigating alternative auction forms for cases where one or more bidders place a somewhat higher value on the objects for sale than do rival bidders. In cases such as these there is a tendency for the advantaged bidder (even when this advantage is very small) to scare off rivals, which can lead to unnecessarily low selling prices for the objects in question. Alternative auction forms promise to help alleviate this problem. 3. Investigating multi-unit demand auctions in which there exist synergies, or complementarities, between the items up for auction. Such auctions create numerous problems in achieving efficient auction outcomes. 4. Understanding the effects of bidding in teams, as opposed to individual bidders. Most past auction experiments have focused on the latter, whereas in many real world setting bidding is done in teams.