On the analysis of asymmetric first price auctions

Experimenting to Learn about Demand in Duopoly with Forward‐Looking Consumers

“…Consequently, the case of repeated procurement is a natural application of the model. In such a case, I shall show in Section IV that the auctioneer may find it beneficial to commit ex‐ante to reveal the inclination towards its preferred supplier, thus giving a rationale for first‐price handicap procurement auctions (Mares and Swinkels [2014a, 2014b]). Alternatively, the consumer may force firms to compete in long‐term contracts by running a (reverse) auction for the whole sequence of goods to be procured, an aspect studied in Section IV(i).…”

“…When one interprets the model as one of repeated procurement auctions with a (hidden) inclination of the auctioneer towards one of the competitors, this gives a rationale for revealing such an inclination before any auction takes place. In other words, this would justify using (first‐price) handicap auctions in procurement (see for instance Mares and Swinkels [2014a, 2014b]).…”

Revenues and welfare in auctions with information release

“…With sufficiently many bidders, the question is equivalent to the question whether the upper end of the support u = max(e L (θ), e H (1)) increases in response to information release. When 20 Notice that p H > θ −1 − p L can only hold if the right hand side is smaller than 1, i.e., if (1 + p L )θ > 1. To see that cases (ii) and (iii) of the proposition are both compatible with (MT), consider p = p L = p H > 1 2 .…”

Procurement auctions with capacity constrained suppliers

“…Balestrieri (2008, chap. 3) analyzes bidding equilibrium with two buyers when the auctioneer/seller has a preference bias towards one bidder. Mares and Swinkels (2014) analyze a first price sealed bid auction when the two suppliers' costs are distributed asymmetrically and when the buyer biases one of the supplier (e.g., better quality). Haruvy and Katok (2013) conduct laboratory experiments with auctions in which the auctioneer/buyer exercises its discretion on winner determination based on non-price "quality" attributes of the suppliers.…”