Discrimination via Symmetric Auctions
研究在拍卖中禁止歧视的法律政策效果，发现即使使用匿名密封投标的对称拍卖，卖家仍能几乎不受限制地歧视不同群体竞拍者，揭示规则表面公正与结果公平之间的巨大差距。
Discrimination (for instance, along the lines of race or gender) is often prohibited in auctions. This is legally enforced by preventing the seller from explicitly biasing the rules in favor of bidders from certain groups (for example, by subsidizing their bids). In this paper, we study the efficacy of this policy in the context of a single object: independent private value setting with heterogeneous bidders. We show that restricting the seller to using an anonymous, sealed bid auction format (or, simply, a symmetric auction) imposes virtually no restriction on her ability to discriminate. Our results highlight that the discrepancy between the superficial impartiality of the auction rules and the resulting fairness of the outcome can be extreme.