Experimental and Theoretical Investigations of Auctions

拍卖在经济学中的实践和理论重要性与日俱增。最近，拍卖在出售政府资产方面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月期间进行了多次电波转播权销售，总共筹集了239亿美元，出售了10,000多个许可证。更壮观的是，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(355.3亿美元)。因此，拍卖承诺既能增加卖方收入，又能更有效地配置资产(将资产交付给最看重资产的买家)。此外，拍卖在交换理论中发挥着重要作用，因为在没有中间做市商的情况下，拍卖仍然是最简单和最熟悉的价格决定手段之一。在代理人拥有私人信息(即竞争对手代理人不知情的信息)的情况下，它们是博弈理论(战略互动)的有价值的说明和最突出的应用之一。尽管取得了这些成功，但在最佳拍卖设计方面仍有一些悬而未决的问题。这项研究将涉及拍卖设计中一些悬而未决的问题的理论和实验研究。这些包括：1.比较多对象Vickrey拍卖的替代形式的效率，至少在理论上，当替代拍卖结构无法提供100%的效率时，该拍卖结构可以提供100%的效率。过去的研究表明，拍卖设计的细节可以使竞拍者更容易接近100%的效率目标。我们将继续对这些问题进行研究。在一个或多个投标人对出售物品的估价略高于竞争对手的情况下，调查替代拍卖形式。在这样的情况下，有优势的竞拍者(即使这种优势很小)有吓跑竞争对手的趋势，这可能会导致有问题的物品的不必要的低售价。另类拍卖形式有望帮助缓解这一问题。3.研究待拍卖物品之间存在协同效应或互补性的多单元需求拍卖。此类拍卖在实现高效拍卖结果方面造成了许多问题。4.了解团队竞价的效果，而不是单个竞标者。过去的大多数拍卖实验都集中在后者上，而在许多现实世界中，竞价是以团队为单位进行的。

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.