Essays on auctions: Theoretical and empirical investigations.
详细信息
文摘
As auctions are becoming an increasingly popular way of selling multiple units of goods, like Treasury securities and cell phone licenses, this thesis analyzes properties of different auction methods. The first chapter provides a model to sell two identical licenses for participating in an oligopolistic market in a sequential auctions setup. The auction for the first license is a first-price, sealed-bid type with an exogenously set reserve price, while the second uses the price of the first unit as the reserve price. This auction rule mimics the license auction for the Turkish Global Mobile Telecommunications in 2000. For some parameter values of the model, this auction setup generates less or equal revenue as selling the monopoly right with the second-price, sealed-bid auction. However, for other parameter values, the seller may get higher revenues.;Chapter 2 investigates the bidder behavior in Treasury bill auctions by using bidder-specific data for Turkish auctions done between 2000--2002 (in the middle of which the Turkish Treasury switched auction types) and the secondary market data. The participation rate increases in the uniform auctions. Auction method affects bidder behavior; the results independent from bidder size reveal bid synchronization in uniform but not in discriminatory auctions. This result is robust for different proxies of market risk and relative abundance of T-Bills in each auction.;Chapter 3 empirically analyzes whether uniform or discriminatory pricing raises more revenue in T-Bill auctions by using the same data set. This study is the first to examine the two methods while taking economic conditions into account. This is done in a three-stage procedure: For each auction, a logistic function is fit to the cumulative bid distribution. Then, I estimate two sets of equations for each auction method relating the logistic function parameters to economic conditions, by treating T-Bill offerings as exogenous. Finally, I predict how much revenue would have been raised from discriminatory auctions if uniform pricing had been used instead, holding economic conditions constant, and vice versa. The results point to the superiority of discriminatory auctions, but may also cast doubt on the assumption that government T-Bill offerings are exogenous.