Full extraction of the surplus in bayesian and dominant strategy auctions
TL;DR: In this article, the authors consider auctions for a single indivisible object, in which the bidders have information about each other which is not available to the seller and show that the seller can use this information to his own benefit, and completely characterize the environ- ments in which a well chosen auction gives him the same expected payoff as that obtainable were he able to sell the object with full information about the bidder's willingness to pay.
Abstract: We consider auctions for a single indivisible object, in the case where the bidders have information about each other which is not available to the seller. We show that the seller can use this information to his own benefit, and we completely characterize the environ- ments in which a well chosen auction gives him the same expected payoff as that obtainable were he able to sell the object with full information about each bidder's willingness to pay. We provide this characterization for auctions in which the bidders have dominant strate- gies, and for those where the relevant equilibrium concept is Bayesian Nash. In both set-ups, the existence of these auctions hinges on the possibility of constructing lotteries with the correct properties. WE CONSIDER the situation in which an agent, the seller, possesses one indivisible unit of a good to which he attaches no value. But the good has value to a number of potential buyers, and its transfer to one of them would increase social welfare. In particular, the transfer to the buyer with the highest valuation maximizes social welfare. In this paper, we completely characterize environments in which the seller can design an auction that will enable him to capture for himself the full increase in social welfare induced by the transfer of the good to the bidder with the highest willingness to pay. If the seller had full information about the reservation prices of potential buyers, his optimal selling strategy would be very simple. He would announce a price equal or very close to the highest reservation value. The optimal strategy for the bidder with the highest evaluation would be to accept the offer. (Note that we are treating a situation in which the seller can commit himself to a price.) As a result of the exchange, the utility of the seller increases by the full amount of the increase in social welfare, and he has been able to fully extract the surplus. In many circumstances, however, a seller has only imperfect knowledge of the buyers' willingnesses to pay. In this case, he must find some mechanism, or auction, which will enable him to maximize his benefit from the sale of the object. The auction literature starts with this observation and shows how the seller can, by an astute choice of auction, extract the largest possible fraction of the surplus. In general, the literature has shown that this proportion is strictly less than one. In some circumstances, the bidders will have information about each other which is not available to the seller. For instance, in auctions for petroleum drilling rights, bidders know the results of geological tests which they have
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26 Dec 2001
TL;DR: Laffont and Martimort as mentioned in this paper focus on the principal-agent model, the "simple" situation where a principal, or company, delegates a task to a single agent through a contract, the essence of management and contract theory.
Abstract: Economics has much to do with incentives--not least, incentives to work hard, to produce quality products, to study, to invest, and to save. Although Adam Smith amply confirmed this more than two hundred years ago in his analysis of sharecropping contracts, only in recent decades has a theory begun to emerge to place the topic at the heart of economic thinking. In this book, Jean-Jacques Laffont and David Martimort present the most thorough yet accessible introduction to incentives theory to date. Central to this theory is a simple question as pivotal to modern-day management as it is to economics research: What makes people act in a particular way in an economic or business situation? In seeking an answer, the authors provide the methodological tools to design institutions that can ensure good incentives for economic agents. This book focuses on the principal-agent model, the "simple" situation where a principal, or company, delegates a task to a single agent through a contract--the essence of management and contract theory. How does the owner or manager of a firm align the objectives of its various members to maximize profits? Following a brief historical overview showing how the problem of incentives has come to the fore in the past two centuries, the authors devote the bulk of their work to exploring principal-agent models and various extensions thereof in light of three types of information problems: adverse selection, moral hazard, and non-verifiability. Offering an unprecedented look at a subject vital to industrial organization, labor economics, and behavioral economics, this book is set to become the definitive resource for students, researchers, and others who might find themselves pondering what contracts, and the incentives they embody, are really all about.
2,454 citations
TL;DR: In this article, Klemperer et al. provide an elementary, non-technical, survey of auction theory, by introducing and describing some of the critical papers in the subject.
Abstract: This paper provides an elementary, non-technical, survey of auction theory, by introducing and describing some of the critical papers in the subject. (The most important of these are reproduced in a companion book, The Economic Theory of Auctions, Paul Klemperer (ed.), Edward Elgar (pub.), forthcoming.); We begin with the most fundamental concepts, and then introduce the basic analysis of optimal auctions, the revenue equivalence theorem, and marginal revenues. Subsequent sections address risk-aversion, affiliation, asymmetries, entry, collusion, multi-unit auctions, double auctions, royalties, incentive contracts, and other topics. Appendices contain technical details, some simple worked examples, and a bibliography for each section.
1,246 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors study efficient Bayes-Nash incentive compatible mechanisms in a social choice setting that allows for informational and allocative externalities, and show that such mechanisms exist only if a congruence condition relating private and social rates of information substitution is satisfied.
Abstract: We study efficient, Bayes-Nash incentive compatible mechanisms in a social choice setting that allows for informational and allocative externalities. We show that such mechanisms exist only if a congruence condition relating private and social rates of information substitution is satisfied. If signals are multi-dimensional, the congruence condition is determined by an integrability constraint, and it can hold only in nongeneric cases where values are private or a certain symmetry assumption holds. If signals are one-dimensional, the congruence condition reduces to a monotonicity constraint and it can be generically satisfied. We apply the results to the study of multi-object auctions, and we discuss why such auctions cannot be reduced to one-dimensional models without loss of generality.
493 citations
TL;DR: A scoring method for eliciting truthful subjective data in situations where objective truth is unknowable, which assigns high scores not to the most common answers but to the answers that are more common than collectively predicted, with predictions drawn from the same population.
Abstract: Subjective judgments, an essential information source for science and policy, are problematic because there are no public criteria for assessing judgmental truthfulness. I present a scoring method for eliciting truthful subjective data in situations where objective truth is unknowable. The method assigns high scores not to the most common answers but to the answers that are more common than collectively predicted, with predictions drawn from the same population. This simple adjustment in the scoring criterion removes all bias in favor of consensus: Truthful answers maximize expected score even for respondents who believe that their answer represents a minority view.
486 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors study the "ex post equivalence" question: when is interim implementation on all possible type spaces equivalent to requiring ex post implementation on the same type space.
Abstract: The mechanism design literature assumes too much common knowledge of the environment among the players and planner. We relax this assumption by studying implementation on richer type spaces, with more higher order uncertainty. We study the "ex post equivalence" question: when is interim implementation on all possible type spaces equivalent to requiring ex post implementation on the
448 citations
References
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TL;DR: Optimal auctions are derived for a wide class of auction design problems when the seller has imperfect information about how much the buyers might be willing to pay for the object.
Abstract: This paper considers the problem faced by a seller who has a single object to sell to one of several possible buyers, when the seller has imperfect information about how much the buyers might be willing to pay for the object. The seller's problem is to design an auction game which has a Nash equilibrium giving him the highest possible expected utility. Optimal auctions are derived in this paper for a wide class of auction design problems.
6,003 citations
"Full extraction of the surplus in b..." refers background in this paper
...The results answer a question originally posed by Myerson (1981)....
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820 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the optimal design of resource allocation mechanisms in the presence of asymmetric information was studied and sufficient conditions were provided under which the seller can extract the full surplus from the buyers in an "ex post Nash" equilibrium.
Abstract: JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. This paper deals with the optimal design of resource allocation mechanisms in the presence of asymmetric information. A buyer's valuation function is allowed to depend on the characteristics of other buyers as well as his own and sufficient conditions are provided under which the seller can extract the full surplus from the buyers in an "ex post Nash" equilibrium. The result is then applied to the important problem of optimal auction design.
633 citations
TL;DR: In this article, it was shown that Groves' scheme is unique on restricted domains which are convex, in particular convex domains, and this generalizes earlier uniqueness results by Green and Laffont and Walker.
Abstract: It is proved that Groves’ scheme is unique on restricted domains which are smoothly connected, in particular convex domains. This generalizes earlier uniqueness results by Green and Laffont and Walker. An example shows that uniqueness may be lost if the domain is not smoothly connected.
401 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors derive necessary and sufficient conditions for a public ex post signal (s ∈ S) that is correlated with the risk-neutral seller's costs to render the initial information asymmetry inconsequential to the buyer.
125 citations
"Full extraction of the surplus in b..." refers background or methods in this paper
...RIORDAN, M. H., AND D. SAPPINGTON (1985): "Optimal Contracts with Public and Private Ex-post Information," mimeo....
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...Conditions similar to those of our Theorem 2 have independently been used by Riordan and Sappington (1985)....
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