Thông tin tài liệu
CHAPTER 13 • Game Theory and Competitive Strategy 521 In a common-value auction, you should (a) use an open rather than a sealedbid auction because, as a general rule, an English (open) common-value auction will generate greater expected revenue than a sealed-bid auction; and (b) reveal information about the true value of the object being auctioned, thereby reducing concern about the winner’s curse and, consequently, encouraging more bidding In a private-value auction, set a minimum bid equal to or even somewhat higher than the value to you of keeping the good for future sale This will protect against a loss if there are relatively few bidders who not value the good very highly Moreover, it could increase the size of the bids by signaling to buyers that the object is valuable Having the opportunity to try again to sell the good if there is no minimum bid is obviously an advantage; however, it can be a disadvantage if failure to sell the good the first time is seen as a signal of low quality to bidders in future auctions Why use an open auction? Recall that in order to avoid the winner’s curse, each bidder in a common value auction will bid below his individual valuation The greater the uncertainty about the true value of the object, the greater the likelihood of an overbid, and therefore the greater the incentive for the bidder to reduce his bid (If the bidder is risk-averse, this effect will be magnified.) However, the bidder faces less uncertainty in an English auction than in a sealed-bid auction because he can observe the prices at which other bidders drop out of the competition—an advantage that provides information about their valuations In short, when you provide more information to bidders, riskaverse bidders will be encouraged to bid more because they will be more confident that they can account for the possibility of a winner’s curse Bidding and Collusion We have seen that sellers at auctions can obtain a significant share of the gains from trade by encouraging competition among buyers It follows, therefore, that buyers can increase their bargaining power by reducing the number of bidders or the frequency of bidding In some cases this can be accomplished legally through the formation of buying groups, but it may also be accomplished illegally through collusive agreements that violate the antitrust laws Collusion among buyers is not easy, because even if an “agreement” is reached, individual buyers will have an incentive to cheat by increasing their bids at the last minute in order to obtain the desired item However, repeated auctions allow for participants to penalize those that break from the agreement by outbidding the “cheater” again and again Buyer collusion is more of a problem in open-bid auctions than in the case of sealed bids because open auctions offer the best opportunity for colluding bidders to detect and punish cheating A well-known case of buyer collusion was the agreement in the mid-1980s among baseball owners to limit their bidding for free-agent players The fact that such bidding was repeated and open made it possible for owners to retaliate against those that bid too often and too aggressively Collusion, however, is not limited to buyers In 2001, two of the world’s most successful auction houses, Sotheby’s and Christie’s, were found guilty of agreeing to fix the price of commissions offered to sellers of auctioned items Former Sotheby’s chairman Alfred Taubman was sentenced to a year in jail for his involvement in the scheme
Ngày đăng: 26/10/2022, 08:09
Xem thêm:
