The Dynamics Of Auction

Addresses how social interaction forms the foundation to sale of art and antiques worth many billions of pounds each year.

Each year art and antiques worth many billions of pounds are sold at auction. These auctions consist of numerous, intense episodes of social interaction through which the price of goods rapidly escalates until sold on the strike of a hammer. In this book, Christian Heath examines the fine details of interaction that arises at auctions, the talk and visible conduct of the participants, and their use of various tools and technologies. He explores how auctioneers, buyers and their representatives are able to transact the sale of goods worth anything from a few dollars through to many millions in just seconds. Heath addresses how order, trust, and competition are established at auctions and demonstrates how an economic institution of some global importance is founded upon embodied action and interaction. The analysis is based on video recordings of sales of art and antiques gathered within a range of national and international auction houses in Europe and the United States.

Markets in Profile explores the confluence of three disparate philosophical frameworks: the Market Profile, behavioral finance, and neuroeconomics in order to present a unified theory of how markets work. The Market Profile is an ever-evolving, multidimensional graphic that gives visual form to the market's continuing auction process, revealing the myriad underlying dynamics that influence market activity. Behavioral finance posits that investors are driven more by emotional factors and the subjective interpretation of minutia than by "rationality" when making investment decisions. And neuroeconomics is the study of how investor psychology permeates and affects the financial markets. Mr. Dalton explicates the ways in which irrational human behavior influences the market's natural auction process, creating frequently predictable market structure, which results in opportunities for investors to ameliorate risk. The book will improve investors ability to interpret change in markets, enabling better, more confident investment decisions.

Abstract: This paper studies bidding dynamics where values and bidding opportunities follow an unrestricted joint Markov process, independent across agents. Bids cannot be retracted, as is frequently the case in auctions. Our main methodological contribution is that we construct a mapping from this general stochastic process into a distribution of values that is independent of the type of auction considered. The equilibria of a static auction with this distribution of values is used to characterize the equilibria of the dynamic auction, making this general class very tractable. As a result of the option of future rebidding, early bids are shaded and under mild conditions increase toward the end of the auction. Our results are consistent with repeated bidding and skewness of the time distribution of winning bids, two puzzling observations in dynamic auctions. As an application, we estimate the model by matching moments from eBay auctions

Leading experts in industrial organization and auction theory examine the recent European telecommunication license auction experience. In 2000 and 2001, several European countries carried out auctions for third generation technologies or universal mobile telephone services (UMTS) communication licenses. These "spectrum auctions" inaugurated yet another era in an industry that has already been transformed by a combination of staggering technological innovation and substantial regulatory change. Because of their spectacular but often puzzling outcomes, these spectrum auctions attracted enormous attention and invited new research on the interplay of auctions, industry dynamics, and regulation. This book collects essays on this topic by leading analysts of telecommunications and the European auction experience, all but one presented at a November 2001 CESifo conference; comments and responses are included as well, to preserve some of the controversy and atmosphere of give-and-take at the conference.The essays show the interconnectedness of two important and productive areas of modern economics, auction theory and industrial organization. Because spectrum auctions are embedded in a dynamic interaction of consumers, firms, legislation, and regulation, a multidimensional approach yields important insights. The first essays discuss strategies of stimulating new competition and the complex interplay of the political process, regulation, and competition. The later essays focus on specific spectrum auctions. Combining the empirical data these auctions provide with recent advances in microeconomic theory, they examine questions of auction design and efficiency and convincingly explain the enormous variation of revenues in different auctions.

A broad overview of market mechanisms, with an emphasis on the interplay between theory and real-life applications; examples range from eBay auctions to school choice. This book offers an introduction to market design, providing students with a broad overview of issues related to the design and analysis of market mechanisms. It defines a market as a demand and a supply, without specifying a price system or mechanism. This allows the text to analyze a broad set of situations—including such unconventional markets as college admissions and organ donation—and forces readers to pay attention to details that might otherwise be overlooked. Students often complain that microeconomics is too abstract and disconnected from reality; the study of market design shows how theory can help solve existing, real-life problems. The book focuses on the interplay between theory and applications. To keep the text as accessible as possible, special effort has been made to minimize formal description of the models while emphasizing the intuitive, with detailed explanations and resolution of examples. Appendixes offer general reviews of elements of game theory and mechanism design that are related to the themes explored in the book, presenting the basic concepts with as many explanations and illustrations as possible. The book covers topics including the basics of simple auctions; eBay auctions; Vickrey–Clarke–Groves auctions; keyword auctions, with examples from Google and Facebook; spectrum auctions; financial markets, with discussions of treasury auctions and IPOs; trading on the stock market; the basic matching model; medical match; assignment problems; probabilistic assignments; school choice; course allocation, with examples from Harvard and Wharton; and kidney exchange.

Smith tells how the straight capitalist economic law of supply and demand rarely governs the auction process, and how the beliefs and actions of the auction participants determine values.

Explore cutting-edge statistical methodologies for collecting, analyzing, and modeling online auction data Online auctions are an increasingly important marketplace, as the new mechanisms and formats underlying these auctions have enabled the capturing and recording of large amounts of bidding data that are used to make important business decisions. As a result, new statistical ideas and innovation are needed to understand bidders, sellers, and prices. Combining methodologies from the fields of statistics, data mining, information systems, and economics, Modeling Online Auctions introduces a new approach to identifying obstacles and asking new questions using online auction data. The authors draw upon their extensive experience to introduce the latest methods for extracting new knowledge from online auction data. Rather than approach the topic from the traditional game-theoretic perspective, the book treats the online auction mechanism as a data generator, outlining methods to collect, explore, model, and forecast data. Topics covered include: Data collection methods for online auctions and related issues that arise in drawing data samples from a Web site Models for bidder and bid arrivals, treating the different approaches for exploring bidder-seller networks Data exploration, such as integration of time series and cross-sectional information; curve clustering; semi-continuous data structures; and data hierarchies The use of functional regression as well as functional differential equation models, spatial models, and stochastic models for capturing relationships in auction data Specialized methods and models for forecasting auction prices and their applications in automated bidding decision rule systems Throughout the book, R and MATLAB software are used for illustrating the discussed techniques. In addition, a related Web site features many of the book's datasets and R and MATLAB code that allow readers to replicate the analyses and learn new methods to apply to their own research. Modeling Online Auctions is a valuable book for graduate-level courses on data mining and applied regression analysis. It is also a one-of-a-kind reference for researchers in the fields of statistics, information systems, business, and marketing who work with electronic data and are looking for new approaches for understanding online auctions and processes. Visit this book's companion website by clicking here

We analyze the price structure of sequential auctions of modern and contemporary art that took place in Italy during the period 1983-96. Contrary to previous empirical studies, we do not find any "afternoon" effect - i.e., a decline of auction prices relative to their estimates. If anything, we find the opposite, or "morning", effect. Our results are robust to different econometric specifications. Taking into consideration the possible dynamic nature of price determination, we propose an interpretation of the empirical results that encompasses previous contributions.

This text bridges the gulf between theoretical economic principles of negotiation and auction theory and their multifaceted applications in actual practice. It is intended to be a supplement to the already existing literature, as a comprehensive collection of reports detailing experiences and results of very different negotiations and auctions.