Unsuccessful bids: Coefficient of variation of bids as indicator of project risk

Missing Bids

We document a novel bidding pattern observed in procurement auctions from Japan: winning bids tend to be isolated. We prove that in a general class of models, missing bids robustly indicate non-competitive behavior. In addition, we provide evidence that missing bids coincide tightly with known cartel activity. Finally, we show that missing bids are consistent with efficient collusion in environ...

Financing auction bids

In many auctions, bidders do not have enough cash to pay their bid. If bidders have asymmetric cash positions and independent private values then auctions will be inefficient. However, what happens if bidders have access to financial markets? We characterize efficient auctions and show that in an efficient auction the information rent that a bidder earns depends generally on both his valuation ...

Information acquisition in auctions: Sealed bids vs. open bids

This paper studies the incentives of a bidder to acquire information in an auction when her information acquisition decision is observed by the other bidders before they bid. Our results show that the incentives are stronger in a sealed bid (second price) auction than in an open (English) auction when the information acquired refers to a common component of the value. However, the ranking is th...

Limit Distributions of Equilibrium Bids in Common

Performance of Auctions and Sealed Bids

We develop models of automated E-commerce techniques, which predict the economic outcomes of these decision mechanisms, including the price attained by a good and the resulting income per unit time, as a function of the rate at which bidders provide the bids and of the time taken by the seller to decide whether to accept a bid. This paper extends previous work in two main directions. Since auto...