Title
Commitment in First-Price Auctions
Abstract
We study a variation of the single-item sealed-bid first-price auction wherein one bidder (the leader) publicly commits to a (possibly mixed) strategy before the others submit their bids. For the case wherein all bidders’ valuations are commonly known, we fully characterize the committed mixed strategy that is optimal for the leader and find that both the leader and the follower with the highest valuation strictly benefit from the commitment, so long as the leader’s valuation is strictly higher than the second highest valuation of the followers. We further show that compared with the simultaneous first-price auction, the leader’s optimal commitment yields the same net utility benefit to both of these bidders. As a result, the two highest valued bidders’ incentives are aligned, facilitating coordination and implementation of the commitment. Finally, we provide characterization of the leader’s optimal commitment in a Bayesian setting with two bidders, leveraging the methodology developed for the complete-information setting.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1007/s00199-017-1069-5
Algorithmic Game Theory
Keywords
Field
DocType
First-price auction,Commitment,Stackelberg game,Collusion,Subgame perfect equilibrium,C61,C72,D44
Bid shading,English auction,Financial economics,Economics,Vickrey auction,Unique bid auction,Microeconomics,Generalized second-price auction,Common value auction,Proxy bid,Revenue equivalence
Conference
Volume
Issue
ISSN
66
2
0302-9743
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
1
0.37
6
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Yunjian Xu19917.82
Katrina Ligett292366.19