REVENUE-CAPPED EFFICIENT AUCTIONS

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Muto, Nozomu; Shirata, Yasuhiro; Yamashita, Takuro
• 署名单位: Yokohama National University; Otaru University of Commerce; Universite de Toulouse
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF THE EUROPEAN ECONOMIC ASSOCIATION
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1542-4766
• DOI: 10.1093/jeea/jvz015
• 发表日期: 2020
• 页码: 1284-1320
• 关键词: offer auctions; buy; COMPETITION; sellers; prices; MODEL

摘要

We study an auctionthat maximizes the expected social surplus under an upper-bound constraint on the seller's expected revenue, which we call a revenue cap. Such a constrained-efficient auction may arise, for example, when (i) the auction designer is pro-buyer, that is, he maximizes the weighted sum of the buyers' and seller's auction payoffs, where the weight for the buyers is greater than that for the seller; (ii) the auction designer maximizes the (unweighted) total surplus in a multiunit auction in which the number of units the seller owns is private information; or (iii) multiple sellers compete to attract buyers before the auction. We characterize the mechanisms for constrained-efficient auctions and identify their important properties. First, the seller sets no reserve price and sells the good for sure. Second, with a nontrivial revenue cap, bunching is necessary. Finally, with a sufficiently severe revenue cap, the constrained-efficient auction has a bid cap, so that bunching occurs at least at the top, that is, no distortion at the top fails.