On the Consequences of Information in the First-Price Auction (LIDS-SSRC Seminar)

Tuesday, April 7, 2015 - 4:00pm to Wednesday, April 8, 2015 - 3:55pm

Event Calendar Category

LIDS Seminar Series

Speaker Name

Dirk Bergemann

Affiliation

Yale University

Building and Room Number

32-155

Abstract

This presentation will discuss how the structure of information can affect welfare outcomes in the first-price auction. For a given distribution of buyers' valuations, we characterize all Bayesian equilibria that can arise under any specifications of the bidders' higher-order beliefs as long as those beliefs are consistent with the common prior distribution of valuations. We derive tight lower and upper bounds on the revenue and the bidder surplus for symmetric and arbitrarily correlated distributions of values with any number of bidders. These results are used to study how entry fees and reserve prices impact the welfare bounds.

Biography

Dirk Bergemann is the Douglass and Marian Campbell Professor of Economics at Yale University and has served as chair of the Department of Economics since 2013. Previously, he served as a faculty member at Princeton University. His research focuses on game theory, contract theory, and mechanism design supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, and the German National Science Foundation. Prof. Bergemann is co-editor of Econometrica and a fellow of the Econometric Society.