Doctoral Dissertation in Economics: Informational Asymmetries and Auction Design: An Experiment

拍卖是分配商品和增加收入的重要机制。石油租赁和频谱拍卖为政府筹集了大量收入，并成为许多经济研究的焦点。这些拍卖中的许多拍卖是针对具有不确定价值的货物，该不确定价值对于所有投标人都是相同的（例如，石油的数量在一个租约）。传统的理论模型假设投标人拥有相同数量的关于货物价值的信息。然而，这种假设忽视了这样一个事实：投标人的信息往往可能不对称，而经验表明这会影响投标行为。了解投标人信息的不对称性如何影响他们的投标行为，对于预测拍卖将产生的收入和设计拍卖以增加他们筹集的收入非常重要。PI扩展了传统的拍卖框架，允许投标人在他们对商品价值的估计和估计的准确性方面有所不同。他们研究当投标人能够和不能观察到对方信息的精确性时，投标行为如何变化。在许多密封投标或在线拍卖中，对方投标人的身份是隐藏的，每个投标人可能无法完全了解对手的信息有多精确。然而，随着互联网拍卖的兴起，卖家在很大程度上控制了出价人所拥有的关于彼此的信息。拍卖设计师应该发布多少关于投标人特征的信息是设计拍卖时的一个重要考虑因素，这是以前没有研究过的。目前的研究项目显示了卖家如何优化设计这些信息的发布。通过研究改变投标人彼此拥有的信息量的影响，PI找到了一种新的途径，通过这种途径，拍卖设计可以提高收入。理论预测表明，公开披露每个投标人信息的准确性会降低拍卖产生的预期收入。这一发现表明，在设计拍卖时，控制投标人彼此之间的信息量是一个需要考虑的重要因素。PI试图通过执行一系列实验来回答以下问题：当投标人知道他们关于商品的信息比其他投标人更精确（或更不精确）时，他们会如何表现？当他们不知道对手信息的准确性时，他们的出价策略会如何变化？拟议中的研究旨在回答这些问题，这将有助于更好地了解在拍卖中披露多少信息。这个实验将提供一个更好的理解如何实施信息设计到拍卖格式。

Auctions are an important mechanism used to allocated goods and raise revenue. Oil-lease and spectrum auctions raise large amounts of revenue for the government and have been the focus of much economic research. Many of these auctions are for goods which have an uncertain value which is the same for all bidders (e.g., the amount of oil in a lease). Traditional theoretical models assume that bidders have the same amount of information concerning the value of the good. However, this assumption ignores the fact that often bidders may be asymmetrically informed, which has been empirically shown to affect bidding behavior. Understanding how asymmetries in bidders' information affects their bidding behavior is important for predicting the revenue an auction will generate and for designing auctions to increase the revenue they raise. The PIs expand the traditional auction framework to allow for bidders to differ both in their estimates of a good's value and the precision of their estimates. They study how bidding behavior changes when bidders can and cannot observe the precision of opposing bidders' information. In many sealed-bid or online auctions, the identity of opposing bidders is hidden and each bidder may not be perfectly informed about how precise his opponent's information is. With the rise of internet auctions, however, sellers have a large degree of control of the information bidders possess about one another. How much information about bidders' characteristics an auction designer should release is an important consideration when designing auctions and is one that has not previously been studied. The current research project shows how sellers can optimally design the release of this information. By studying the impact of changing how much information bidders possess about one another, the PIs find a new avenue by which auction design can improve revenue generation. The theoretical predictions show that publicly revealing the precision of each bidder's information decreases the expected revenue an auction will generate. This finding suggests that controlling how much information bidders have about each other is an important factor to consider when designing auctions. The PIs seek to answer the following question by performing a series of experiments: how do bidders behave when they know that their information about the good is more (or less) precise than other bidders? How do their bidding strategies change when they do not know the precision of their opponents information? The proposed study intends to answer these questions, which will contribute to a better understanding of how much information to disclose in auctions. This experiment will provide a better understanding of how to implement information design into auction formats.