Increasing Competition and the Winner's Curse: Evidence from Procurement
利用新泽西交通部的建筑采购拍卖数据，实证检验了竞争加剧如何影响均衡投标行为，发现投标人数从3人增至6人时，中位采购成本上升约30%，表明信息不对称下更多竞争未必有利。
We empirically measure the eects increasing competition on equilibrium bidding in procurement auctions. In common-value auctions, the winner's curse counsels more conservative bidding as the number of competitors increases. First, we estimate the structural parameters of an equilibrium bidding model and test for the importance of common-value components in bidders' preferences. Second, we use these estimates to calculate the effects of increasing competition on both individual bids as well as winning bids, i.e., procurement costs. We analyze bid data from construction procurement auctions run by the New Jersey transportation department. Our results indicate that, for a large subset of these auctions, the median procurement cost rises as competition intensies: increasing the number of bidders from 3 to 6 raises median procurement costs by about 30%. In this setting, then, asymmetric information overturns the common economic wisdom that more competition is always desirable.