The big news in our world is that the Nobel Prize was announced today for economists. (We call it “the Nobel Prize”.)
Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson win for 2020. They are known for auction theory and design. Here is a popular introduction from the Nobel Committee.
This prize is special to me because auction design was one of the very first practical problems that presented me with a chance to put economic ideas into practice. As an undergraduate at Chapman University, I had the privilege to spend time talking with people like Vernon Smith and Dave Porter. Some people think of Vernon Smith as being someone who “does things in the lab”. The thing that he actually did was often auctions.
My master’s thesis at Chapman University was a project on auctions. A practical problem to motived our inquiry. Students at Chapman were upset about the way that the most convenient parking spots were allocated. Concerns about parking showed up in quantitative student satisfaction surveys.
We designed an auction to price and allocate the most coveted parking spots. In this scenario, multiple items are being sold because the parking lot has many spots. Hence the “multi-unit” in the title of our paper Information Effects in Uniform Price Multi‐Unit Dutch Auctions.
We had an important question, since we were actually going to run an auction that would affect people’s lives. How to we choose from among the different possible auction formats?
Paul Milgrom (with Robert J. Weber) provided guidance to us in their 1982 paper in Econometrica.
Among other things, in that paper, they compare the revenue properties of English auctions and Dutch auctions. In an English auction, the price starts low and bidders compete to out-bid each other until the price is so high that only one bidder remains. That is the popular conception of an auction. There is another mechanism class (Dutch) in which the price starts higher than anyone wants to pay and drops until a buyer jumps in. Once you start thinking about how many ways one could run an auction, then you need some way to decide between all the mechanisms.
Theory can help you predict who will be better off under different formats. And, in my case, needing to figure out the revenue properties of different auction formats can help you learn economic theory!
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