Видеозапись семинара "Auctions for Complements: Theory and Experiments"

 

Speaker:   

Alexander Levkun - HSE, Center for Institutional Studies 

Co-authors: 

Alex Teytelboym - University of Oxford   
Daniel Marszalec - University of Tokyo 

 

We experimentally examine the effects of information in sealed-bid auctions for complementary items. We focus on four auctions: first-price, Vickrey, as well as Vickrey-nearest rule and reference rule. In our setting, three bidders (two local and one global) bid on two items. Our treatments involve varying the correlation in the valuations of the local bidders. We find no effect of this information on any auction. Moreover, we elicit bidders' expectations of other bidders' bids. We find that all bidders overestimate how much other bidders are going to bid relative to the Bayesian Nash equilibrium and therefore overbid themselves. Information affects expectations in the first-price auction only. We show that these findings are inconsistent with level-k reasoning when each subject has a fixed k. 

Keywords: auctions, complementarities, information, package bidding, experiments