Raising Bidders' Awareness in Second-Price Auctions

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Li, Ying Xue, Schipper, Burkhard C.
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Li, Ying Xue
Schipper, Burkhard C.
author_facet Li, Ying Xue
Schipper, Burkhard C.
contents When bidders bid on complex objects, they might be unaware of characteristics effecting their valuations. We assume that each buyer's valuation is a sum of independent random variables, one for each characteristic. When a bidder is unaware of a characteristic, he omits the random variable from the sum. We study the seller's decision to raise bidders' awareness of characteristics before a second-price auction with entry fees. Optimal entry fees capture an additional unawareness rent due to unaware bidders misperceiving their probability of winning and the price to be paid upon winning. When raising a bidder's individual awareness of a characteristic with positive expected value, the seller faces a trade-off between positive effects on the expected first order statistic and unawareness rents of remaining unaware bidders on one hand and the loss of the unawareness rent from the newly aware bidder on the other. We present characterization results on raising public awareness together with no versus full information. We discuss the winner's curse due to unawareness of characteristics.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_12676
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Raising Bidders' Awareness in Second-Price Auctions
Li, Ying Xue
Schipper, Burkhard C.
Theoretical Economics
Computer Science and Game Theory
When bidders bid on complex objects, they might be unaware of characteristics effecting their valuations. We assume that each buyer's valuation is a sum of independent random variables, one for each characteristic. When a bidder is unaware of a characteristic, he omits the random variable from the sum. We study the seller's decision to raise bidders' awareness of characteristics before a second-price auction with entry fees. Optimal entry fees capture an additional unawareness rent due to unaware bidders misperceiving their probability of winning and the price to be paid upon winning. When raising a bidder's individual awareness of a characteristic with positive expected value, the seller faces a trade-off between positive effects on the expected first order statistic and unawareness rents of remaining unaware bidders on one hand and the loss of the unawareness rent from the newly aware bidder on the other. We present characterization results on raising public awareness together with no versus full information. We discuss the winner's curse due to unawareness of characteristics.
title Raising Bidders' Awareness in Second-Price Auctions
topic Theoretical Economics
Computer Science and Game Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.12676