Competition Among Auctioneers

In this paper, we analyse a multistage game of competition among auctioneers. In a first stage, auctioneers commit to some publicly announced reserve prices, and in a second stage, bidders choose to participate in one of the auctions. We prove existence of Nash equilibria in mixed strategies for the whole game. We also show that one property of the equilibrium set is that when the numbers of auctioneers and bidders tend to infinity, almost all auctioneers with production cost low enough to trade announce a reserve price equal to their production costs. Our paper confirms previous results for some "limit" versions of the model by McAfee (1993), Peters (1997), and Peters and Severinov (1997)