Bidding

About: Bidding is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 15371 publications have been published within this topic receiving 294233 citations. The topic is also known as: competitive bidding.

The Direct Entry Versus Takeover Decision and Stock Price Performance Around Takeovers

Abstract: The authors develop a Cournot oligopoly model of an industry with a potential entrant. Entry into the industry can be effected either directly or through acquisition of an incumbent. They establish the existence of an equilibrium in which the types of potential entrant differentiate themselves by the entry strategy chosen. A takeover offer generated by this behavior reveals information to the capital markets, which respond in a manner consistent with the empirical evidence by driving up the value of the targeted incumbent and driving down the value of the bidding entrant. Copyright 1994 by University of Chicago Press.

A Framework for Truthful Online Auctions in Cloud Computing with Heterogeneous User Demands

Abstract: Auction-style pricing policies can effectively reflect the underlying trends in demand and supply for the cloud resources, and thereby attracted a research interest recently. In particular, a desirable cloud auction design should be (1) online to timely reflect the fluctuation of supply-demand relations, (2) expressive to support the heterogeneous user demands, and (3) truthful to discourage users from cheating behaviors. Meeting these requirements simultaneously is non-trivial, and most existing auction mechanism designs do not directly apply. To meet these goals, this paper conducts the first work on a framework for truthful online cloud auctions where users with heterogeneous demands could come and leave on the fly. Concretely speaking, we first design a novel bidding language, wherein users’ heterogeneous requirement on their desired allocation time, application type, and even how they value among different possible allocations can be flexibly and concisely expressed. Besides, building on top of our bidding language we propose COCA, an incentive-Compatible (truthful) Online Cloud Auction mechanism. To ensure truthfulness with heterogenous and online user demand, the design of COCA is driven by a monotonic payment rule and a utility-maximizing allocation rule. Moreover, our theoretical analysis shows that the worst-case performance of COCA can be well-bounded, and our further discussion shows that COCA performs well when some other important factors in online auction design are taken into consideration. Finally, in simulations the performance of COCA is seen to be comparable to the well-known off-line Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism [19] .

The Discrete-choice Willingness-to-pay Question Format in Health Economics:: Should We Adopt Environmental Guidelines?

Abstract: The use of willingness to pay (WTP) in valuing the benefits of health care programs is increasing. Although such values have been derived using open-ended, bidding, or payment-card techniques, recently discrete-choice questionnaires have been advocated, particularly following the report of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration concerning the validity of using WTP to estimate environmental benefits. It is argued that discrete-choice questions offer a more realistic market, and will therefore lead to more valid responses and yield higher response rates through reduced mental demands. The author reviews these issues in a critical assessment of discrete-choice questions.

Ex Post Information in Auctions

Abstract: assumptions. Maskin and Riley (1984) show that when the amount a buyer is willing to pay for the auctioned object is not independent of his wealth, expected revenue tends to be lower under open bidding. In contrast, Milgrom and Weber (1982) relax the assumption that valuations are independent and assume instead that buyers' private estimates of the item's value are affiliated. A buyer with a high estimate then tends to believe that other buyers will have higher estimates as well. Maintaining the other assumptions, Milgrom and Weber show that expected revenue is higher in the open ascending bid auction. The intuition behind this result is that in sealed high bid auctions a buyer's bid is determined not only by his own beliefs but, via their bids, by the beliefs of those with lower estimates. A buyer with a low estimate believes that others are more likely to have low estimates as well. He therefore bids less aggressively. It follows that a buyer can beat all opponents who have lower estimates with a bid which is lower than it would be if beliefs were independent.2 Milgrom and Weber also show that if the seller purchases and then publicly reveals information which is positively linked to buyers' valuations, this also raises expected (gross) revenue from an auction. The intuition here is that this helps to reduce the difference in bidders' willingness to pay.3 That such a reduction should raise expected revenue is easily understood for the limiting case in which the seller's information includes all the buyers' private information; for then all buyer asymmetry is eliminated and so expected buyer profit is bid away to zero. The seller therefore reaps the entire surplus. In the following pages the implications of correlated signals are further explored. While Milgrom and Weber emphasized the potential gains to a seller who reveals information ex ante, the focus here is on ex post information. In Section 2 it is shown that, under weak assumptions, the sealed high bid auction is dominated by any auction