bidder preferences among auction institutions i introduction auctions have become a pervasive method of exchange in the online world as each day thousands of auctions take place online and this trade volume totals to billions of dollars worth of goods per year 1 this large volume of auction transactions implies the existence of a large number of sellers competing for buyers the obvious implication is that the competition among the sellers for the pool of potential buyers can be fierce and any competitive edge a seller can find could be important one such competitive edge a seller might exploit is using an auction design that attracts bidders away from their competitors when designing a real auction or modeling a theoretical one the entry decision of prospective bidders is rarely considered most auction analysis is performed assuming that a certain number of bidders will participate for certain or perhaps that the number of bidders is unknown and randomly determined it should be clear however that the most crucial part of a successful auction is encouraging as many bidders as possible to participate in general this should be expected to have a positive effect on revenue at least in noncommon value environments and in certain types of auctions it may help combat the possibility of bidder collusion because there are typically competing auctions available for similar goods or even outside options that bidders can pursue when auctions are for unique goods it is important to understand how the aspects of an auction format can effect the entry decision of a bidder consider a bidder who is faced with the choice of entering one of two auctions for similar or even identical objects how does this bidder make the decision of which auction to enter the obvious answer is that the bidder will enter into the auction that maximizes his or her expected utility so long as that expected utility is greater than some reservation value the real question then is how are these expected utilities constructed profit from participating in the auction is an obvious argument there are also a number of environmental considerations that might effect this decision that would be difficult to account for precisely such as the reputation and trustworthiness of the auctioneer quality of the advertisement for the auction and things of this nature it is also possible that the format of the auction itself can have an impact on the preferences of the bidder this latter point will be the issue of this study the particular focus will be looking at bidder preferences between the two most common standard auction formats used in the field the sealed bid first price will be abbreviated as just the sealed bid auction and the ascending or english auction the other reason we are interested in comparing these two auction formats rather than the ascending and second price or first price and descending is that it seems reasonable to expect bidders to have preferences between the two due to the strategic differences between them such differences lead to substantial differences in terms of the difficulty of deciding how to bid and also in the possibility that an outcome leads to a bidder experiencing some form of regret regret may occur in a first price auction when a bidder loses to a bid that is below his value as he may think that if only he had bid higher he could have won although such feelings of regret may be considered irrational that does not preclude their existence such a scenario should not reasonably occur in an ascending auction if one considers the situation of a bidder choosing between two auctions that differ only in regard to whether the auction is being conducted according to an ascending or sealed bid format it is not immediately obvious which would be the most preferred even assuming a standard symmetric independent private values environment were all bidders risk neutral then of course revenue equivalence would hold and the bidders would be indifferent

auctions with endogenous entry abstract predictions from auction models with endogenous bidder participation depend on whether entry takes place under asymmetric information or not auctions that are not revenue equivalent in the former set up may be so in the latter moreover under asymmetric information the social planner does not discourage entry even when the bid preparation cost is large

on favoritism in auctions with entry abstract we examine the problem of endogenous entry in a single unit auction when the seller s welfare depends positively on the utility of a subset of potential bidders we show that unless the seller values those bidders welfare more than her own private utility a nondiscriminatory auction is optimal

reserve prices without commitment abstract when potential bidders in an auction have to incur a cost to prepare their bids and thus to learn their valuations imposing a reserve price and announcing that in case no bid is submitted there will be another auction without a reserve price is both revenue and welfare improving reserve prices that induce less than maximum entry in the first auction may be optimal also entry fees are not necessarily better instruments than reserve prices journal of economic literatureclassification number d44

on strategic community development this paper examines strategic behavior of developers who through offering different congested public good packages and revenue fiscal schemes compete for residents who are differentiated by income there is an endogenous determination of numbers and sizes of communities developers have an incentive to strongly differentiate their public good offerings in terms of pricing strategies developers exhibit sharply contrasting behaviors in low income communities housing consumption is subsidized once lots are priced in high income communities housing consumption is generally taxed

equilibrium in auctions with entry the authors model entry incentives in auctions with risk neutral bidders and characterize a symmetric equilibrium in which the number of entrants is stochastic the presence of too many potential bidders raises coordination costs that detract from welfare the authors show that the seller and society can benefit from policies that reduce market thickness i e the relative abundance of buyers their analysis extends well known revenue equivalence and ranking theorems but also demonstrates that variations in the auction environment affect optimal policies e g reservation prices in ways not anticipated by models that ignore entry copyright 1994 by american economic association

house prices and the provision of local public services capitalization under school choice programs abstract while the theoretical public finance literature argues that house prices should be influenced by the demand for local public services there is little direct evidence concerning changes in house prices when these services are altered previous empirical studies have relied on cross sectional identification of the relationship between house prices and variables that may proxy for the perceived quality of local public services this paper instead examines a policy change the adoption of a public school choice program to identify the capitalization effects associated with the diminished importance of school district boundaries using data from inter district choice in minnesota i find that residential properties appreciate significantly in school districts where students are able to transfer to preferred school districts whereas residential property values decline in districts that accept transfer students these general equilibrium effects also influence school districts local property tax revenues mitigating the incentive for schools to improve in order to attract or retain students

capitalization and the median voter the past decade has witnessed a strong interest among students of local public finance in models of voting with one s feet and in models of actual voting several authors including noel edelson susan rose ackerman and michael lea have recognized that these two types of voting must be considered simultaneously the capitalization of local fiscal variables into house values which is a by product of voting with one s feet influences the decisions of the median voter and the pattern of local services that arises through actual voting influences the allocation of households to communities a full fleged merger of the two types of voting requires an analysis of capitalization in a model that considers both the housing market and the local voting process in a metropolitan area with diverse local governments financed by property taxes previous articles have focused on pieces of this puzzle this paper reviews my attempt to bring these pieces together my analysis reveals that regardless of supply responses capitalization is a feature of long run equilibrium furthermore in the presence of capitalization an efficient pattern of local services cannot be obtained through voting with one s feet but must be obtained instead through actual voting if preferences in a community are not too diverse the median voter will pick the efficient level of services with or without capitalization however the median voter s choice may not be efficient in an extremely heterogeneous community in addition capitalization breaks the link between tax payments and the choice of a community and thereby insures that the property tax is not a benefit tax in other words it insures that housing is underconsumed relative to other goods these results provide a framework for evaluating state and federal policies toward local governments without much heterogeneity within communities one could achieve efficiency by eliminating the property tax or offsetting it with large subsidies to housing these approaches are not realistic however and a second best solution is to cut back local services the form of such a cutback is important i show that tax limitations do not lead to efficiency but that a second best solution could be obtained by redesigning intergovernmental grants

the implications of competition among jurisdictions does tiebout need politics the paper investigates whether compensation among local jurisdiction is by itself sufficient to ensure efficient provision of local public goods jurisdictions have fixed boundaries and each has an entrenched government with the power to tax and supply the public good residents can move costlessly among jurisdictions it is shown that competition among numerous jurisdictions is not sificient to guarantee public sector efficiency though residents can vote with their feet land is immobile hence governments can unsurp some land rents for their own ends increasing the number of jurisdictions limits but cannot completely eliminate the ability to exercise discretionary governmental power

the optimum quantity of debt abstract we find that the welfare gains to being at the optimum quantity of debt rather than the current us level are small and therefore concerns regarding the high level of debt in the us economy may be misplaced this finding is based on a model of a large number of infinitely lived households whose saving behavior is influenced by precautionary saving motives and borrowing constraints this model incorporates a different role for government debt than is found in standard models and it captures different cost benefit trade offs on the benefit side government debt enhances the liquidity of households by providing an additional means of smoothing consumption and by effectively loosening borrowing constraints on the cost side the implied taxes have adverse wealth distribution and incentive effects in addition government debt crowds out capital via higher interest rates and lowers per capita consumption

a comparison of buyer determined and price based multiattribute mechanisms reverse auctions are fast becoming the standard for many procurement activities in the past the majority of such auctions have been solely price based but increasingly attributes other than price affect the auction outcome specifically the buyer uses a scoring function to compare bids and the bid with the highest score wins we investigate two mechanisms commonly used for procurement in business to business markets in a setting in which buyers welfare is affected by exogenous nonprice attributes such as the quality service and past relationships under both mechanisms bidders bid based on price but in the buyer determined mechanism the buyer is free to select the bid that maximizes her surplus while in the price based mechanism the buyer commits to awarding the contract to the low price bidder we find both in theory and in the laboratory that the buyer determined mechanism increases the buyer s welfare only as long as enough suppliers compete if the number of suppliers is small and the correlation between cost and quality is low the buyer is better off with the price based mechanism these findings are intended to help procurement managers make better decisions in designing procurement mechanisms for a variety of settings

ranking auctions with risk averse bidders this paper ranks first and second price independent value auctions with risk averse bidders when entry is endogenous unless bidders exhibit decreasing absolute risk aversion dara the fixed n ranking of first price over second price is sustained however when bidders exhibit dara we show that the effect of entry sometimes reverses the ranking we discuss how elements of the auction environment such as the relative magnitude of entry costs the number of potential bidders and the degree of risk aversion affect the ranking journal of economic literatureclassification numbers d44 d82 c72

optimal auctions revisited in symmetric privately known values oral auctions with costly entry for bidders the seller can do no better than by committing ex ante to a reservation price and entry fees or subsidies which result in no fewer and at most one more bidders than a reservation price equal to the seller s value would in the absence of entry fees or subsidies journal of economic literature classification numbers d44 c72

why do households without children support local public schools linking house price capitalization to school spending while residents receive similar benefits from many local government programs only about one third of all households have children in public schools we argue that capitalization of school spending into house prices can encourage even childless residents to support spending on schools we identify a proxy for the extent of capitalization the supply of land available for new development and show that towns in massachusetts with little undeveloped land have larger changes in house prices in response to a plausibly exogenous spending shock towns with little available land also spend more on schools we extend these results using data from school districts in 46 states showing that per pupil spending is positively related to the percentage of developed land this positive correlation persists only in districts where the median resident is a homeowner and is stronger in districts with more elderly residents who do not use school services and have a shorter expected duration in their home our findings support models in which capitalization encourages the provision of durable local public goods and provides an additional reason why some elderly support local school spending

the shill bidding effect versus the linkage principle abstract the analysis of second price auctions with externalities is utterly modified if the seller is unable to commit not to participate in the mechanism for the general symmetric model introduced by milgrom and weber p milgrom r weber a theory of auctions and competitive bidding econometrica 50 1982 1089 1122 we characterize the full set of separating equilibria that are symmetric among buyers and with a strategic seller being able to bid in the same way as any buyer through a so called shill bidding activity the revenue ranking between first and second price auctions is different from the one arising in milgrom and weber the benefits from the highlighted linkage principle are counterbalanced by the shill bidding effect

capitalization and the theory of local public finance the tiebout literature is incomplete this paper argues because it has not fully accounted for the capitalization of local fiscal variables into house values the paper explains why capitalization arises why it persists in long run equilibrium how it affects both residential location and the outcome of local voting and why it interferes with the efficiency of a system of local governments the analysis which is based on the main tiebout assumptions plus a property tax combines a model of household bids in a housing market with a median voter model of local public service determination

the effectiveness of government debt and transfers as insurance abstract government debt and redistributive taxation can help people to smooth consumption when facing uninsurable individual specific risk i examine the effects that variations in public debt and transfers have on risk sharing efficiency and the distribution of resources i find that risk sharing can be improved significantly by both debt and transfers but that debt has adverse effects on equity when used in isolation debt will enhance welfare if transfers are lower than optimal however the beneficial effects of public debt vanish if transfers are used optimally

robustness of bidder preferences among auction institutions i introduction the answer to the question of how bidders choose to enter one auction versus an alternative competing auction is important to understand in providing a complete picture of the nature of endogenous entry decisions into auctions the issue of how a bidder chooses which among alternative auctions to enter as well as whether to enter an auction at all is of substantial importance to auctioneers attempting to attract bidders to their auctions there is a growing literature addressing issues in endogenous entry in auctions there are several papers such as engelbrecht wiggans 1993 pevnitskaya 2004 and palfrey and pevnitskaya 2008 that consider the decision of whether to enter an auction or not and study the effect of endogenous entry on bidding behavior there is a much larger group for example harstad 1990 engelbrecht wiggans 1993 levin and smith 1994 mcafee 1993 and mcafee and mcmillan 1987 that considers competition between auctioneers in which the auctioneers are competing along some characteristic such as entry price we consider the case in which auctioneers may be competing with each other based on the choice of auction mechanism our interest is in the degree to which the auction mechanism itself might impact the entry decisions of potential bidders of course there would be a direct pecuniary impact of the mechanism in that bidders should be more likely to enter auction mechanisms that they believe allow them to get lower prices but there may be other cognitive issues in regard to the structure of the mechanism that may also impact the choice behavior in ivanova stenzel and salmon iss 2004a we introduced an experimental design aimed at eliciting and measuring preferences subjects might possess for different auction institutions and applied the design to testing bidder preferences between ascending a dynamic mechanism and sealed bid first price a static mechanism auctions it seems reasonable to expect bidders to have preferences between these two auction mechanisms due to the strategic differences between them in a first price auction the winner pays a price equal to his own bid whereas in the ascending auction he pays a price that is an increment above the second highest bid these differences might result in difficulty of deciding how to bid and in the possibility of experiencing some form of regret 1 the design involved having subjects make a choice between entering into a two bidder sealed bid first price auction versus a two bidder ascending auction each with different entry prices by varying the entry prices we could measure the subjects willingness to pay for either auction our main finding in the paper was that while subjects exhibited strong preferences for the ascending auction at equal entry prices they were not willing to pay up to the expected profit difference between the two auctions to participate in an ascending auction thus they ended up entering the supposedly less preferred sealed bid first price auction even in situations in which they would expect to make a higher net surplus including the cost of the entry fee by entering into the ascending auction instead that paper proposed one possible answer to the puzzle that involved assuming that bidders were risk averse in their bidding behavior and then risk averse to the same degree in their auction choice behavior this explanation worked because neither risk averse nor approximately risk neutral bidders should be expected to pay much to enter into an ascending auction instead of a sealed bid first price auction just as we observed in the experiment for the most risk averse bidders this is because while they bid the highest in the first price auction and therefore expected little surplus in the event that they win they consequently end up winning with higher probability than less risk averse bidders this is a trade off risk a verse bidders are willing to accept and consequently it is easy to show that highly risk averse bidders should not be willing to pay much to get into the more lucrative though risky ascending auction

optimal fiscal policy in a business cycle model this paper develops the quantitative implications of optimal fiscal policy in a business cycle model in a stationary equilibrium the ex ante tax rate on capital income is approximately zero there is an equivalence class of ex post capital income tax rates and bond policies that support a given allocation within this class the optimal ex post capital tax rates can range from close to independently and identically distributed to close to a random walk the tax rate on labor income fluctuates very little and inherits the persistence properties of the exogenous shocks thus there is no presumption that optimal labor tax rates follow a random walk most of the welfare gains realized by switching from a tax system like that of the united states to the ramsey system come from an initial period of high taxation on capital income

the high low divide self selection by values in auction choice abstract most prior theoretical and experimental work involving auction choice has assumed bidders find out their value after making a choice of which auction to enter we examine whether or not bidders knowing their value prior to making a choice of which among multiple alternative auction formats to enter impacts their choice decision and or the outcome of the auctions the results show a strong impact on auction choice subjects with low values choose the first price sealed bid auction more often while subjects with high values choose the ascending auction more often the number of bidders in each auction revenue efficiency and average bidder surplus all end up equalized

risk aversion and optimal reserve prices in first and second price auctions abstract we analyze the effects of buyer and seller risk aversion in first and second price auctions in the classic setting of symmetric and independent private values we show that the seller s optimal reserve price decreases in his own risk aversion and more so in the first price auction the reserve price also decreases in the buyers risk aversion in the first price auction thus greater risk aversion increases ex post efficiency in both auctions especially that of the first price auction at the interim stage the first price auction is preferred by all buyer types in a lower interval as well as by the seller

indicative bidding an experimental analysis indicative bidding is a practice commonly used in sales of complex and very expensive assets theoretical analysis shows that efficient entry is not guaranteed under indicative bidding since there is no equilibrium in which more qualified bidders are more likely to be selected for the final sale furthermore there exist alternative bid procedures that in theory at least guarantee 100 efficiency and higher revenue for the seller we employ experiments to compare actual performance between indicative bidding and one of these alternative procedures the data shows that indicative bidding performs as well as the alternative procedure in terms of entry efficiency while having other characteristics that favor it over the alternative procedure our results provide an explanation for the widespread use of indicative bidding despite the potential problem identified in the equilibrium analysis

imperfect competition in auction designs we study the competition between two owners of identical goods who wish to sell them to a pool of potential buyers the sellers compete simultaneously setting reserve prices for their second price sealed bid auctions upon observing the set reserve prices the buyers decide simultaneously in which auction to bid we show that this game has at least one equilibrium and that all equilibria are inefficient reserve prices are not driven to zero cost we also discuss where and why the parallel between optimal auction design and optimal pricing in the case of monopoly breaks down for oligopoly

contracting with endogenous entry we analyze entry in markets where a principal contracts with a privately informed agent before learning his production cost the agent knows his probability of having a low cost his ex ante type and decides whether to pay an entry fee to contract with the principal there are two cut off equilibria that determine the possible types of an agent who actually enters the market and neither equilibrium can be discarded by standard selection criteria contrasting with standard intuition in the equilibrium with the highest cut off an increase in the entry fee reduces the marginal type of the agent who enters thus increasing entry and the expected cost of an entrant this equilibrium is selected by a criterion based on robustness to equilibrium risk even though the equilibrium with the lowest cut off is pareto dominant for the agent public policies that increase entry barriers may be welfare improving

why do sellers usually prefer auctions we compare the most common methods for selling a company or other asset when participation is costly a simple simultaneous auction and a sequential process in which potential buyers decide in turn whether to enter the bidding the sequential process is always more efficient but preemptive bids transfer surplus from the seller to buyers because the auction is more conducive to entry precisely because of its inefficiency it usually generates higher expected revenue we also discuss the effects of lock ups matching rights break up fees as in takeover battles entry subsidies etc

optimal taxation without state contingent debt in an economy studied by lucas and stokey tax rates inherit the serial correlation structure of government expenditures belying barro s earlier result that taxes should be a random walk for any stochastic process of government expenditures to recover a version of barro s random walk tax smoothing outcome we modify lucas and stokey s economy to permit only risk free debt having only risk free debt confronts the ramsey planner with additional constraints on equilibrium allocations beyond one imposed by lucas and stokey s assumption of complete markets the ramsey outcome blends features of barro s model with lucas and stokey s in our model the contemporaneous effects of exogenous government expenditures on the government deficit and taxes resemble those in lucas and stokey s model but incomplete markets put a near unit root component into government debt and taxes an outcome like barro s however we show that without ad hoc limits on the government s asset holdings outcomes can diverge in importa

ex ante efficient mechanism with private entry costs this paper studies ex ante efficient resource allocation mechanism in an environment where agents endowed with their private values must incur private entry costs to participate due to the nature of this bidimensional screening problem and the difficulty in fully characterizing all implementable endogenous entries the domain of the related social planner s problem that is essential for establishing the existence of efficient mechanism needs to be carefully designed we find that a second price auction among the entrants with a reserve price equal to the seller s valuation is ex ante efficient and any ex ante efficient mechanism must be ex post efficient jel d44 d61 d82

differential capitalization of local public service characteristics analysis of the capitalization of property tax and public service differentials has come a long way since oates s pathbreaking work oates 1969 it is now well established that interjurisdictional differentials in local property tax rates and public service levels are reflected to some degree in house prices heinberg and oates 1970 meadows 1976 mcdougall 1976 king 1977 in addition intrajurisdictional tax capitalization may occur due to local assessment practices church 1974 black 1977 edelstein 1974 bloom ladd and yinger 1980 however there has been little research undertaken exploring the possibility of intrajurisdictional public service capitalization intrajurisdictional tax and publicservice capitalization represents an important extension of the tiebout analysis of the local public sector tiebout 1956 while individuals may respond to differentials in public service levels and tax rates in their mobility and house purchase decisions it is not at all clear that these attributes are valued uniformly for all units within a jurisdiction it may be that the proximity of a unit to a school rather than school quality determines value or capitalization may depend more on structural characteristics such as the size of a house the neglect of this point has been in large part due to data limitations most studies assume either explicitly or implicitly that benefits from public services are uniform within jurisdictions studies using aggregate data on a jurisdiction or census tract unit of observation focus on the impact of interjurisdictional service differentials on the median valued house such data do not permit an exploration of the interrelationship between housing and public service characteristics studies utilizing micro data relate housing prices to jurisdiction wide expenditures or quality measures such as reading scores to test the capitalization hypothesis however these public sector characteristics are seldom related to individual housing characteristics and there has been little systematic study of the possibility of significant interaction between public sector and other housing and location characteristics

reducing government debt in the presence of inequality abstract what are the welfare effects of government debt in particular what are the welfare consequences of government debt reductions we answer these questions with the help of an incomplete markets economy with production households are subject to uninsurable income shocks we make several contributions first by targeting the skewed wealth and earnings distribution of the us economy in our calibration we identify inequality as the major driver of the welfare effects of public debt gdp changes second we show that in order to fully gauge the welfare consequences and the political feasibility of government debt changes it is crucial to consider the transitional dynamics between stationary equilibria our results therefore have important implications for the design of debt reduction policies since the skewed wealth distribution generates a large fraction of borrowing constrained households a public debt reduction should be non linear such that the tax burden is postponed into the future

upping the ante how to design efficient auctions with entry of primary importance in auction design is the set of strategies available to the seller at the auction stage we first formalize hold up regarding entry costs that preys on second price auctions when the seller may engage in a costly shill bidding activity we derive the optimal reserve and show how shill bidding can make posted prices outperforming auctions second we advocate for a new regulation where shills would be banned but with the possibility of canceling sales ex post which offers some valuable flexibility the english auction with jump bids implements then the first best in general environments

field experiments on the effects of reserve prices in auctions more magic on the internet i present experimental evidence on the effects of minimum bids in first price sealed bid auctions the auction experiments manipulated the minimum bids in a preexisting market on the internet for collectible trading cards from the game magic the gathering i examine a number of outcomes including the number of participating bidders the probability of sale the levels of individual bids and the auctioneer s revenues the benchmark theoretical model is one with symmetric risk neutral bidders with independent private values the results verify a number of the predictions concerning equilibrium bidding many bidders behave strategically anticipating the effects of the reserve price on others bids

optimal fiscal and monetary policy in an economy without capital abstract this paper is concerned with the structure and time consistency of optimal fiscal and monetary policy in an economy without capital in a dynamic context optimal taxation means distributing tax distortions over time in a welfare maximizing way for a barter economy our main finding is that with debt commitments of sufficiently rich maturity structure an optimal policy if one exists is time consistent in a monetary economy the idea of optimal taxation must be broadened to include an inflation tax and we find that time consistency does not carry over an optimal inflation tax requires commitment by rules in a sense that has no counterpart in the dynamic theory of ordinary excise taxes the reason time consistency fails in a monetary economy is that nominal assets should from a welfare maximizing point of view always be taxed away via an immediate inflation in a kind of capital levy this emerges as a new possibility when money is introduced into an economy without capital

scale economies and the dynamics of recurring auctions we analyze the dynamics of a game of sequential bidding in the presence of stochastic scale effects either economies or diseconomies of scale we show that economies of scale give rise to declining expected equilibrium prices whereas the converse is not generally true moreover first and second price auctions are not always revenue equivalent economies of scale make second price auctions more profitable for the seller whereas revenue equivalence may be preserved in the case of diseconomies

tax timing and liquidity constraints a heterogeneous agent model this paper considers the ricardian equivalence hypothesis in a model in which some families face binding liquidity constraints and others do not the source of heterogeneity that generates binding constraints in some families but not in others is shown to be the rate of intergenerational discount in an economy populated by these two types of families a change in tax timing has non ricardian short run effects but many ricardian long run effects this implies that heterogeneous agent models can reconcile some of the conflicting empirical evidence on ricardian equivalence copyright 1993 by ohio state university press

entry coordination and auction design with private costs of information acquisition i introduction in most auction literature bidders are passively endowed with private information about their valuations the analysis then focuses on optimal elicitation of private information on many occasions bidders may instead have to incur costs to collect this information 1 auction design in these cases has to balance between information acquisition and information elicitation which are interdependent the performance of an auction depends not only on the bidding equilibrium but also crucially on the information acquisition equilibrium 2 as a salient feature auction design with information acquisition costs has been complicated by entry coordination among bidders due to multiple entry equilibria issue in a symmetric independent private value ipv setting of mcafee and mcmillan 1987 with fixed information acquisition cost levin and smith 1994 note that the ex ante efficient and revenue maximizing auction a second price auction with no entry fee and no reserve induces many asymmetric entry equilibria other than the targeted symmetric one the existence of asymmetric entry equilibria in this setup fundamentally lies in bidders constant marginal cost of entry 3 information acquisition costs could be private information of bidders just as with their private information about values for example in the cases of construction procurements or u s timber auctions many aspects of prebid information acquisition and analyzation are private knowledge of bidders 4 clearly when information acquisition costs are private information of bidders auction design has to additionally take into account information elicitation at the information acquisition stage this aspect of analysis has yet to be reflected in the literature while the case with fixed information acquisition costs has been thoroughly studied by milgrom 1981 mcafee and mcmillan 1987 engelbrecht wiggans 1987 1993 harstad 1990 levin and smith 1994 mcafee quan and vincent 2002 ye 2004 2007 and cremer spiegel and zheng 2009 among others a widely recognized insight of these studies is that ex ante efficiency can be achieved through a second price auction while setting the reserve at the seller s valuation if ex ante entry fees can be used to extract all the expected surplus of bidders then there is a congruence between the revenue and total surplus 5 this article advances this line of research by studying the implications of private acquisition costs on auction design with an emphasis on bidders coordination at the information acquisition stage specifically we consider the ipv setting of mcafee and mcmillan 1987 and levin and smith 1994 while allowing the information acquisition costs to be bidders private information which follow a continuous distribution in light of our previous discussion this article attempts to answer the following questions 1 how are ex ante efficient and revenue maximizing auctions affected by this additional dimension of private information in other words how does information rent extraction at the entry stage affect the auction designs 2 can this private information alleviate rather than aggravate the problem of entry coordination with the dispersion in private information acquisition costs the multiplicity of entry equilibria arising from the constant marginal cost in levin and smith 1994 might be avoidable the types with higher information acquisition costs must have less incentive to enter which could reduce the number of entry equilibria the questions are will sufficient dispersion coordinate bidders and induce a unique entry if yes how much dispersion is enough due to the potential multiplicity of entry equilibria for any given mechanism it is rather difficult to compare performances across varieties of mechanisms to overcome this difficulty we come up with an alternative approach our analysis begins with characterizing efficient and revenue maximizing auctions for any given feasible entry pattern which can be described through a vector of bidders entry thresholds of acquisition costs

revenue equivalence revisited the conventional wisdom in the auction design literature is that first price sealed bid auctions tend to make more money while ascending auctions tend to be more efficient we re examine these issues in an environment in which bidders are allowed to endogenously choose in which auction format to participate our findings are that more bidders choose to enter the ascending auction than the first price sealed bid auction and this extra entry is enough to make up the revenue difference between the formats consequently we find that both formats raise approximately the same amount of revenue they also generate efficiency levels and bidder earnings that are roughly equivalent across mechanisms though the earnings in the ascending might be slightly higher

complements and substitutes in sequential auctions the case of water auctions we use data on sequential water auctions to estimate demand when units are com plements or substitutes a sequential english auction model determines the estimating structural equations when units are complements one bidder wins all units by paying a high price for the first unit thus deterring others from bidding on subsequent units when units are substitutes different bidders win the units with positive probability paying prices similar in magnitude even when the same bidder wins all units we re cover individual demand consistent with this stark pattern of outcomes and confirm it is not collusive but consistent with non cooperative behavior demand estimates are biased if one ignores these features

public versus private provision of liquidity is there a trade off abstract to what extent is public debt private liquidity much policy advice given in the aftermath of the financial crisis rests on the assumption that increasing public debt relaxes borrowing constraints of private households this is the case for ad hoc debt limits which are exogenous to public policy instead if debt limits are fully endogenous as e g in the case of the natural borrowing limit public debt has no impact we assume that borrowing limits arise because of limited contract enforceability and are therefore determined as equilibrium outcomes using an incomplete markets economy in which households are subject to uninsurable earnings shocks we show that public debt provides some liquidity but less so than it would if constraints were imposed ad hoc we show that generating borrowing constraints as an equilibrium outcome substantially alters the answers to other important questions such as for the welfare effects of government debt or its impact on real economic activity

capitalization and community size abstract studies often show taxes and public services capitalized into house prices but no one has tested whether the rate of capitalization depends on community size the theoretical model of w h hoyt 1999 regional science and urban economics 29 155 171 predicts that capitalization occurs but that the rate of capitalization is weaker in large communities hoyt s model is tested empirically using a house price hedonic framework the tax capitalization results are less clear but the school quality and crime results firmly support the model s predictions using both school districts and municipalities to measure communities larger communities weaken the rate of capitalization

why do governments end up with debt short run effects matter this paper reconsiders the impact of public debt in an economy with heterogeneous households and incomplete markets to emphasize the short run effects of an increase in public debt as compared to models that rest on steady state analysis we show that the welfare gains of a public debt increase are substantially higher when transitional dynamics are accounted for the additional debt issue allows for a temporary reduction in the income tax rate which stimulates labor supply and generates an overshooting of the interest rate the short run gains create a temptation to deviate toward higher levels of debt debt increases continue to generate welfare gains even when debt is considerably higher than its long run optimal level

fiscal policy with heterogeneous agents and incomplete markets i undertake a quantitative investigation into the short run effects of changes in the timing of proportional income taxes for model economies in which heterogeneous households face a borrowing constraint temporary tax changes are found to have large real effects in the benchmark model a temporary tax cut increases aggregate consumption on impact by around 29 cents for every dollar of tax revenue lost comparing the benchmark incomplete markets model to a complete markets economy income tax cuts provide a larger boost to consumption and a smaller investment stimulus when asset markets are incomplete copyright 2005 wiley blackwell

estimating housing demand with an application to explaining racial segregation in cities we present a three stage nonparametric estimation procedure to recover willingness to pay for housing attributes in the first stage we estimate a nonparametric hedonic home price function in the second stage we recover each consumer s taste parameters for product characteristics using first order conditions for utility maximization finally in the third stage we estimate the distribution of household tastes as a function of household demographics as an application of our methods we compare alternative explanations for why blacks choose to live in center cities while whites suburbanize

a dynamic model of bertrand competition with entry abstract this paper analyzes a simple repeated game of simultaneous entry and pricing we report a surprising property of the symmetric equilibrium solution if the number of potential competitors is increased above two the market breaks down with higher probability and the competitive outcome becomes less likely more potential competition lowers welfare another bertrand paradox the model can also be applied to auctions to explore whether a revenue maximizing auctioneer should restrict the number of bidders if bidder participation is costly

the tiebout model bring back the entrepreneurs several recent papers in the literature have reformulltlated the nature of equilibrium in ifiebout mo lels by alssliuim ing an exogenous number of communities inflexible commullity l ou alaries anti in pirticular inactive lantlowners and developers ihis paper argues that these assumptions are unwarranted and resul1t iin in eterminate solutions and incorrect analyses determinate lon1g run1 solutions require equilibrium in intercommui land markets which in turn require giving lantlowners and or entrepreneurial leveloelers an active role in the models the role of politics in these models and its juxtaposition with entrepreneurial activities are also analyzed

on absolute auctions and secret reserve prices from a theory viewpoint the use of auctions with zero public reserve prices also called absolute auctions or of auctions with secret reserve prices is somewhat puzzling despite being common by allowing that buyers differ in their processing of past data regarding how the participation rate varies with the auction format and how reserve prices are distributed when secret we show in a competitive environment that these auction formats may endogenously emerge we also analyze how buyers with various sophistications and sellers with various costs sort into the different formats thereby offering a range of testable predictions alternative approaches are reviewed

auctions with heterogeneous entry costs it is well known that if bidders have independent private values and homogeneous entry costs a rst or second price auction with a reserve price equal to the seller s value maximizes social surplus and seller revenue and leaves bidders with no surplus further in mixed strategy entry equilibria social surplus and seller revenue decrease with the number of bidders we show that when entry costs are heterogeneous and private information the revenue maximizing reserve price is above the seller s value a positive inspection fee and a reserve price equal to the seller s value generates even more revenue and in either case bidders capture informational rents further seller revenue and social surplus may either increase or decrease with the number of bidders nevertheless seller revenue is asymptotically the same whether entry costs are homogeneous or heterogeneous our results are framed in terms of screening values rather than reserve prices and apply to any standard auction

premium auctions and risk preferences abstract in a premium auction the seller offers some payback called premium to a set of high bidders at the end of the auction this paper investigates how the performance of such premium tactics is related to the bidders risk preferences we analyze a two stage english premium auction model with symmetric interdependent values in which the bidders may be risk averse or risk preferring upon establishing the existence and uniqueness of a symmetric equilibrium we show that the premium causes the expected revenue to increase in the bidders risk tolerance a net premium effect is key to this result

sequential auctions of stochastically equivalent objects abstract we show that in sequential auctions of a large enough number of stochastically equivalent objects with bounded values prices will on average have a downwards trend

on discrimination in auctions with endogenous entry abstract when entry is exogenous strong buyers should be discriminated against weak buyers to maximize revenues myerson 1981 when entry is endogenous so that entrants expected payoffs do not depend on the proposed mechanism optimal discrimination takes a completely different form the revenue maximizing equilibrium requires that there should be no discrimination with respect to entrants irrespective of their ex ante characteristics besides those buyers who always participate should be discriminated against entrants independently of their strength these predictions are independent of the equilibrium selection when the number of potential entrants grows large the optimality of first price auctions is also discussed jel d44 h57

capitalisation of fiscal variables and land scarcity fiscal packages usually capitalise into house prices yet if enough land for construction is available housing developers could supply new houses and capitalisation may disappear this paper provides a theoretical model in which income taxes and public services capitalise at lower rates when housing supply elasticity increases using an empirical linear interaction model we estimate the impact of available land for construction on capitalisation rates with a panel of swiss communities results indicate that fiscal variables do not capitalise differently in communities where housing supply is constrained by land availability thus land availability is a necessary but not sufficient condition for capitalisation to disappear

edge versus center finding common ground in the capitalization debate abstract a continuing debate questions whether capitalization of taxes and public services into house price occurs the current study argues for an inverse relationship between housing supply elasticity and capitalization rates a sample is split into houses on the interior and edge of the urban area capitalization of schooling and crime occurs everywhere but it is weaker toward the edge of an urban area where housing supply elasticities and developer activity are greater tax results are less robust but the capitalization rates of crime and school quality are roughly twice as strong on the interior than on the urban fringe

introduction to the symposium phe stimulus for this symposium was the appearance in 1996 of richard caves multinational enterprise and economic analysis caves book is one of several books that could be used as the starting point in an inquiry into the future of economics research on international business john dunning s multinational enterprises and the global economy and peter buckley and mark casson s the future of the multinational enterprise are other books that come to mind and there are surely more however caves book has one notable feature lacking in the others the 1996 book is the second edition appearing fourteen years after its predecessor in 1982 the two caves editions thus permit the reader not only to gauge the stock of economics research available on the multinational firm in the early 1980s but also to know how one eminent scholar in the field has appraised the flow over the decade or so that followed the topical and methodological distribution of this flow segment we believe can provide market signals of where economics oriented researchers or perhaps more to the point journal editors have placed their bets on scholarly work what better time than now to ask other notable scholars in the field to add their judgments to caves in a jibs symposium a secondary but important stimulus was the recent administrative change in jibs the journal has moved through another orderly transition in its history with the transfer to a new editor a new home institution and a reconstituted board of editorial advisors we thought that analyses of trends in international business scholarship would be useful to jibs new team we conceived of this symposium as a way for recognized scholars in the field of international business to use caves work as a benchmark so to speak to bring light on two issues first have any important strands of research slipped through caves net second where do these scholars place their bets on the topics and research methods that will yield the highest returns to scholars over the next two decades we invited professor caves as well to add his own insights on scholarly roads less traveled but routes which could lead to new perspectives on international business each participant in the symposium has used one or more chapters from

estimating property tax capitalization a further comment in recent years an increasingly popular area of empirical investigation has concerned attempts to test tiebout s 1956 hypothesis that allocative efficiency in the provision of public services may be attained through a system of local governments 1 in his seminal contribution to the analysis of the tiebout hypothesis and the capitalization of property taxes oates 1969 reasoned that if consumers are sensitive to the public service benefits and property tax costs associated with home ownership these factors should be reflected in housing prices until recently most studies of the capitalization phenomenon have followed oates s specification in which housing values are regressed on a vector of housing characteristics public service measures and a tax price term 2 as several analysts have noted 3 however attempts to test the tiebout hypothesis by using an oates type equation must certainly lead to failure this is so because in a perfect tiebout equilibrium a marginal increase in housing value brought about by increased provision of public services must necessarily be offset by a marginal decrease in housing value caused by the added tax cost assuming that

exclusive dealing through resellers in auctions with stochastic bidder participation this paper demonstrates that a seller prefers to exclude final consumers from an auction and sell only to resellers when these resellers can gain access at a cost to a sufficiently bigger market than the seller himself the intuition is that resellers recoup their expenses for marketing the item by reselling it to final consumers if some consumers participate in the first auction and are outbid by the resellers then their values for the item are relatively low outbidding part of their customer base is bad news for the resellers and this depresses their bids when consumers compete with them the socially optimal and revenue maximizing choices of auction format may not coincide restricting participation of consumers may be socially optimal but privately suboptimal and vice versa the results suggest that i the exclusion of final consumers in some auctions may not be driven by transaction cost considerations and ii sellers should not necessarily sell directly to consumers even though new technologies allow them to do so at essentially zero cost unless they can access a sufficiently large portion of the market

optimal public debt redux abstract we examine the role played by government investment in infrastructure in determining the optimal quantity of public debt in a heterogeneous agent economy with incomplete insurance markets calibrating our model to the key aggregate and distributional moments of the u s economy for the period 1990 2015 we show that i the inclusion of infrastructure and ii transitional dynamics between stationary states critically affect the characterization of the optimal level of public debt our results indicate that the inclusion of public infrastructure in the model specification implies a lower optimal debt level relative to the specification without infrastructure both when comparing stationary equilibria and when accounting for transitional dynamics when welfare comparisons are made by comparing stationary equilibria we find that it is optimal for the government to accumulate assets public surplus however once transitional dynamics are accounted for accumulating debt becomes optimal with the optimal share implied by our model being significantly higher than the average public debt gdp ratio for the u s observed during our sample period

hazardous waste sites and property values in the state of new jersey the polluter pays principal is justified as a deterrent to future pollution however the us experience suggests that it has considerably reduced the clean up rate of existing hazardous waste sites coaseapos s theorem is used as basis to propose that a partnership between the polluters and property owners near these sites will not only ease financial burden but will also speed up the pace of cleanup a hedonic price model is used to empirically estimate the impact of siting of hazardous waste sites on property values and determine the economic feasibility of the proposed partnership the empirical estimates are based on municipality level data from the state of new jersey the benefis from speedy clean up of hazardous waste sites to new jersey property owners are observed to exceed the cleanup cost of these sites