Sealed-bid versus ascending spectrum auctions
基于澳大利亚900MHz频谱拍卖环境，比较第一价格密封投标拍卖与同步多轮拍卖在效率、收入、价格发现等方面的表现，发现前者在互补品场景下更优。
Abstract We compare the first-price sealed-bid (FPSB) auction and the simultaneous multiple-round auction (SMRA) in an environment based on the recent sale of 900 MHz spectrum in Australia. Three bidders compete for five indivisible items. Bidders can win at most three items and need to obtain at least two to achieve profitable scale, i.e. items are complements. Value complementarities, which are a common feature of spectrum auctions, exacerbate the “fitting problem” and undermine the usual logic for superior price discovery in the SMRA. We find that the FPSB outperforms the SMRA across a range of bidding environments: in terms of efficiency, revenue, and protecting bidders from losses due to the exposure problem. Moreover, the FPSB exhibits superior price discovery and almost always results in competitive (“core”) prices unlike the SMRA, which frequently produces prices that are too low because of demand-reduction or too high because of the exposure problem. We demonstrate the robustness of our findings by considering two-stage variants of the FPSB and SMRA as well as environments in which bidders know their own values but not the distributions from which values are drawn.