
handle: 10419/150352
Summary: Many empirical studies of auctions rely on the assumption that the researcher observes all variables that make auctions differ \textit {ex ante}. When there is unobserved heterogeneity, the direction of the bias this causes is known only in a few restrictive examples. In this paper, I show that ignoring unobserved heterogeneity in a first price sealed bid auction with symmetric independent private values gives bounds on several quantities of economic interest under surprisingly general conditions. The results apply to certain quantities related to expectations of valuations, including bidder profits (which can be used to recover bid preparation costs in entry models) and the efficiency loss of assigning the object randomly. I then turn to estimation of these bounds, and show that, when only the winning bid is available, the rate of convergence can be slower than the square root of the number of auctions observed and depends on the number of bidders. These results apply more generally to estimation of functionals of a distribution from repeated observations of an order statistic and may be of independent interest. I apply these methods to bound the efficiency loss from replacing a set of procurement auctions for highway construction in Michigan with random assignment.
Auctions, bargaining, bidding and selling, and other market models, L-statistics, Auctions, ddc:330, Asymptotic distribution theory in statistics, unobserved heterogeneity, auctions, nonstandard asymptotics, Applications of statistics to economics
Auctions, bargaining, bidding and selling, and other market models, L-statistics, Auctions, ddc:330, Asymptotic distribution theory in statistics, unobserved heterogeneity, auctions, nonstandard asymptotics, Applications of statistics to economics
| selected citations These citations are derived from selected sources. This is an alternative to the "Influence" indicator, which also reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically). | 0 | |
| popularity This indicator reflects the "current" impact/attention (the "hype") of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network. | Average | |
| influence This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically). | Average | |
| impulse This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network. | Average |
