Simon Finster // Center for Research in Economics and Statistics (CREST), Palaiseau, France and ENSAE, Paris, France
To the profileEquitable Auctions
Research Seminars: Virtual Market Design SeminarThe paper presented in this Virtual Market Design Seminar initiates the study of how auction design affects the division of surplus among buyers. The authors propose a parsimonious measure for equity and apply it to the family of standard auctions for homogeneous goods. The used surplus-equitable mechanism is efficient, Bayesian-Nash incentive compatible, and achieves surplus parity among winners ex-post. The uniform-price auction is equity-optimal if and only if buyers have a pure common value. Against intuition, the pay-as-bid auction is not always preferred in terms of equity if buyers have pure private values. In auctions with price mixing between pay-as-bid and uniform prices, the authors provide prior-free bounds on the equity-preferred pricing rule under a common regularity condition on signals.
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