Bid distributions of competing agents in simple models of auctions

In economics, there are many ways to describe the interaction between a "seller" and a "buyer". The most common one, with which we interact almost every day, is selling for a fixed price. This option is perfect for selling a mass product, when we have a number of sellers and many buyers, and the price for the product varies depending on the conditions of the relationship between supply and demand. Another situation meets us already in markets, where a product can be either ma...

A minimal model of a market of myopic non-cooperative agents who trade bilaterally with random bids reproduces qualitative features of short-term electric power markets, such as those in California and New England. Each agent knows its own budget and preferences but not those of any other agent. The near-equilibrium price established mid-way through the trading session diverges to both much higher and much lower prices towards the end of the trading session. This price diverg...

The paper proposes a parsimonious and flexible semiparametric quantile regression specification for asymmetric bidders within the independent private value framework. Asymmetry is parameterized using powers of a parent private value distribution, which is generated by a quantile regression specification. As noted in Cantillon (2008) , this covers and extends models used for efficient collusion, joint bidding and mergers among homogeneous bidders. The specification can be esti...

We present a simple model of a stock market where a random communication structure between agents gives rise to a heavy tails in the distribution of stock price variations in the form of an exponentially truncated power-law, similar to distributions observed in recent empirical studies of high frequency market data. Our model provides a link between two well-known market phenomena: the heavy tails observed in the distribution of stock market returns on one hand and 'herding' ...

Consider a seller that intends to auction some item. The seller can invest money and effort in advertising in different market segments in order to recruit $n$ bidders to the auction. Alternatively, the seller can have a much cheaper and focused marketing operation and recruit the same number of bidders from a single market segment. Which marketing operation should the seller choose? More formally, let $D=\{\mathcal D_1,\ldots, \mathcal D_n\}$ be a set of distributions. Our...

The paper studies the problem of auction design in a setting where the auctioneer accesses the knowledge of the valuation distribution only through statistical samples. A new framework is established that combines the statistical decision theory with mechanism design. Two optimality criteria, maxmin, and equivariance, are studied along with their implications on the form of auctions. The simplest form of the equivariant auction is the average bid auction, which set individual...

We provide efficient estimation methods for first- and second-price auctions under independent (asymmetric) private values and partial observability. Given a finite set of observations, each comprising the identity of the winner and the price they paid in a sequence of identical auctions, we provide algorithms for non-parametrically estimating the bid distribution of each bidder, as well as their value distributions under equilibrium assumptions. We provide finite-sample esti...

Auctions are modeled as Bayesian games with continuous type and action spaces. Determining equilibria in auction games is computationally hard in general and no exact solution theory is known. We introduce an algorithmic framework in which we discretize type and action space and then learn distributional strategies via online optimization algorithms. One advantage of distributional strategies is that we do not have to make any assumptions on the shape of the bid function. Bes...

We analyze empirical data from the internet auction site Aukro.cz. The time series of activity shows truncated fractal structure on scales from about 1 minute to about 1 day. The distribution of waiting times as well as the distribution of number of auctions within fixed interval is a power law, with exponents $1.5$ and $3$, respectively. Possible implications for the modeling of stock-market fluctuations are briefly discussed.

We present an agent based model of a single asset financial market that is capable of replicating several non-trivial statistical properties observed in real financial markets, generically referred to as stylized facts. While previous models reported in the literature are also capable of replicating some of these statistical properties, in general, they tend to oversimplify either the trading mechanisms or the behavior of the agents. In our model, we strived to capture the mo...