Auctions with financial externalities (Q2642869)

The paper studies auctions with financial externalities, i.e., the auctions in which losers benefit directly or indirectly from a high price paid by the winner. The framework is as follows. There are \(n \geq 2\) risk neutral bidders who bid for one indivisible object in first-price or second-price sealed-bid auction. Each bidder receives a one-dimensional private signal. The signals are independently drawn from the uniform distribution on \([0,1]\). A bidder private value of the object depends on the vector of signals obtained by all bidders. Financial externalities are exogenously given and modelled by a parameter inserted in the bidders' utility functions. Auctions without and with reserve price are considered. In the first case, the authors derive Bayesian Nash equilibria of first-price sealed-bid (FPSB) auction and second-price sealed-bid (SPSB) auction. In the FPSB auction, larger financial externalities result in a lower expected price, and in the SPSB auction the effect is ambiguous. Moreover, it is shown that the seller cannot gain more revenue by guaranteeing the losing bidders a fraction of the auction revenue. In the case of auction with a reserve price, only the independent private values model is discussed. The authors find that both type of auctions may have pooling at the reserve price. This finding suggests that identical bids need not be a signal of collusion, in contrast to what is sometimes argued in anti-trust cases. Many earlier models (for example: \textit{R. Engelbrecht-Wiggans} [Games Econ. Behav. 6, No. 3, 339--346 (1994; Zbl 0804.90030)], \textit{J. K. Goeree} and \textit{T. Offerman} [Econometrica 72, No. 1, 281--294 (2004; Zbl 1140.91459)] , \textit{P. Cramton, R. Gibbons} and \textit{P. Klemperer} [Econometrica 55, 615--632 (1987; Zbl 0632.90097)], \textit{J. Morgan} [Econ. Theory 23, No. 4, 909--923 (2004; Zbl 1100.91529)], \textit{G. Deltas} [Econ. Theory 19, No. 2, 243--269 (2002; Zbl 1140.91360)], \textit{T. Kittsteiner} [Games Econ. Behav. 44, No. 1, 54-.76 (2003; Zbl 1066.91033)]) can be considered as a special case of the model proposed in the present paper.