Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Economic experiments conducted in laboratories employing an induced-values methodology can report on allocative efficiencies observed. This methodology is limited by requiring the experimenter to know subjects' motivations, an impossibility in field experiments. Allocative efficiency implies a hypothetical costless aftermarket would be inactive. An outcome of an allocation mechanism is herein defined to be behaviorally efficient if an appropriate aftermarket is actually appended to the allocation mechanism and at most a negligible aggregate size of mutually beneficial gains is observed on the aftermarket. Methodological requirements for observation of behavioral efficiency or inefficiency are put forward. A simple field demonstration indicates when an increase in public good output can cover marginal cost in a mutually beneficial decentralization, without knowing valuations. Several empirical issues that arise with the methodology are noted. C9; C93; D01; D61; D03; D46; Keywords: behavioral efficiency, field experiment methodology, allocative efficiency, revelation of valuations, aftermarkets * I thank, without implicating, Marc Willinger for organizing experimental facilities and arrangements, Dimitri Dubois for assistance in conducting experiments, Dubois and Rafaele Preget for translating instructions, Willinger and Sophie Thoyer for organizing financial support, David Levine, Alvin Roth and Cathleen Johnson for useful suggestions, LAMETA at Universite de Montpellier for providing experimental facilities, and CNRS and INRA for financial support of the experiment, and ISER at Osaka University for support during the writing. Terms of use: Documents in Behavioral Efficiency I: Definition, Methodology and Demonstration AbstractEconomic experiments conducted in laboratories employing an induced-values methodology can report on allocative efficiencies observed. This methodology is limited by requiring the experimenter to know subjects' motivations, an impossibility in field experiments. Allocative efficiency implies a hypothetical costless aftermarket would be inactive. An outcome of an allocation mechanism is herein defined to be behaviorally efficient if an appropriate aftermarket is actually appended to the allocation mechanism and at most a negligible aggregate size of mutually beneficial gains is observed on the aftermarket. Methodological requirements for observation of behavioral efficiency or inefficiency are put forward. A simple field demonstration...

Information aggregation, a key concern for uniform-price, common-value auctions with many bidders, has been characterized in models where bidders know exactly how many rivals they face. A model allowing for uncertainty over the number of bidders is essential for capturing a critical condition for information to aggregate: as the numbers of winning and losing bidders grow large, information aggregates if and only if uncertainty about the fraction of winning bidders vanishes. It is possible for the seller to impart this information by precommitting to a specified fraction of winning bidders, via a proportional selling policy. Intuitively, this makes the proportion of winners known, and thus provides all the information that bidders need to make winner's curse corrections.

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in AbstractPotential bidders respond to a seller's choice of auction mechanism for a common-value or a¢ liated-values asset by endogenous decisions whether to incur an information-acquisition cost (and observe a private estimate), or forgo competing. Privately informed participants decide whether to incur a bid-preparation cost and pay an entry fee, or cease competing. Auction rules and information ‡ows are quite general; participation decisions may be simultaneous or sequential. The resulting revenue identity for any auction mechanism implies that optimal auctions are allocatively e¢ cient; a nontrivial reserve price is revenue-inferior. Optimal auctions are otherwise contentless: any auction that sells without reserve becomes optimal by adjusting any one of the continuous, spanning parameters, e.g., the entry fee. Seller's surplus-extracting tools are now substitutes, not complements. Many econometric studies of auction markets are seen to be ‡awed in their identi…cation of the number of bidders.