Equilibrium selection in interdependent value auctions

Elnaz Bajoori*, Dries Vermeulen

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

In second-price auctions with interdependent values, bidders do not necessarily have dominant strategies. Moreover, such auctions may have many equilibria. In order to rule out the less intuitive equilibria, we define the notion of distributional strictly perfect equilibrium (dspe) for bayesian games with infinite type and action spaces. This equilibrium is robust against arbitrary small perturbations of strategies. We apply dspe to a class of symmetric second-price auctions with interdependent values. We show that the efficient equilibrium defined by milgrom (1981) is a dspe, while a class of less intuitive, inefficient, equilibria introduced by birulin (2003) is not.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)47-56
Number of pages10
JournalMathematical Social Sciences
Volume98
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Mar 2019

Keywords

  • PURE-STRATEGY EQUILIBRIA
  • PERFECT EQUILIBRIUM
  • BAYESIAN GAMES
  • EXISTENCE

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