Most prior theoretical and experimental work involving auction choice has assumed bidders only find out their value after making a choice of which autcion to enter. In this paper we examine whether or not subjects knowing their value prior to making an auction choice impacts their choice...

The conventional wisdom in the auction design literature is that first price sealed bid auctions tend to make more money while ascending auctions tend to be more efficient. We re-examine these issues in an environment in which bidders are allowed to endogenously choose in which auction format to...

This study examines bidder preferences between alternative auction institutions. In particular we seek to experimentally characterize the degree to which bidders prefer an ascending auction over a sealed bid auction. We find very strong ceteris paribus preferences for the ascending institution...

Ivanova-Stenzel and Salmon (2004a) established some interesting yet puzzling results regarding bidders’ preferences between auction formats. The finding is that bidders strongly prefer the ascending to the first price sealed bid auction on a ceteris paribus basis but they are not willing...

This study presents a laboratory experiment of the first and second price sealed bid auctions with independent private values, where the distribution of bidder valuations is unknown. In our experimental setting, in first price auctions, bids are lower with the presence of ambiguity. This result...

Are commonly known beliefs essential for bidding behavior in asymmetric auctions? Our experimental results suggest that not informing participants how values are randomly generated does not change behavior much and may even make it appear more rational.

We review an asymmetric auction experiment. Based on Plum (1992) private valuations of the two bidders are independently drawn from distinct but commonly known distributions, one of which stochastically dominating the other. We test the qualitative properties of that model of asymmetric...

This paper suggests an identification and estimation approach based on quantile regression to recover the underlying distribution of bidders' private values in ascending auctions under the IPV paradigm. The quantile regression approach provides a flexible and convenient parametrization of the...

This paper proposes an approach to proving nonparametric identification for distributions of bidders' values in asymmetric second-price auctions. I consider the case when bidders have independent private values and the only available data pertain to the winner's identity and the transaction...

Bidders’ risk attitudes have important implications for sellers seeking to maximize expected revenues. In ascending auctions, auction theory predicts bid distributions in Bayesian Nash equilibrium does not convey any information about bidders' risk preference. We propose a new approach for...