The Effect of Shill Bidding upon Prices: Experimental Evidence

This paper explores, through a series of experiments, the effect of shill bidding upon revenues and prices in auctions. We study the practice of shill bidding in a common value framework. Our findings are consistent with the theoretical prediction that, if bidders are aware of the possibility of seller participation in an auction, shill bidding lowers profits on average. Shill bidding can alleviate the problem of the winner's curse by lowering the price and it can, thus, provide benefits to the bidders. Finally, even though there were too many bidders that submitted bids in these auctions, the number of entrants was not affected by the possibility of seller participation, which is also consistent with the theory.Auctions, Experiment, Shill Bidding, Entry

The Effect of Information on the Bidding and Survival of Entrants in Procurement Auctions

In government procurement auctions of construction contracts, entrants are typically less informed and bid more aggressively than incumbent firms. This bidding behavior makes them more susceptible to losses a¤ecting their prospect of survival. In April of 2000, the Oklahoma Department of Transportation started releasing the internal cost estimates to complete highway construction projects. Using newly developed quantile regression approaches, this paper examines the impact of the policy change on aggressive entrants. First, we find that the information release eliminates the bidding differential between entrants and incumbents attributed to informational asymmetries. Second, we argue that the policy change a¤ects the prospects of survival of entrants in the market. We find that those who used to exit the market relatively soon are now staying 37 percent longer, while at the median level bidding duration increased by roughly 68 percent. The policy has the potential to encourage entry in government procurement auctions and thus increase competition.Entry; Survival; Information Release; Procurement Auctions

The Impact of Public Information on Bidding in Highway Procurement Auctions

A number of papers in the theoretical auction literature show that the release of information regarding the seller’s valuation of an item can cause bidders to bid more aggressively. This widely accepted result in auction theory remains largely untested in the empirical literature. Recent theoretical work has also shown that this effect can be more pronounced in auctions with larger common cost uncertainty. We examine the impact of a policy change by the Oklahoma Department of Transportation that led to the release of the state’s internal estimate of the costs to complete highway construction projects. We perform a differences-in-differences analysis comparing bidding in Texas, a state that had a uniform policy of revealing the same information all throughout the period of analysis, to bidding in Oklahoma. Our results show that, in comparison to Texas auctions, the average bid in Oklahoma fell after the change in engineers’ cost estimate (ECE) policy. This decline in bids was even larger for projects where the common uncertainty in costs is greater. Moreover, the within-auction standard deviation of bids fell after the change in ECE policy with the most significant decline observed again in projects with greater common cost uncertainty.Information Release, Procurement Auctions

The impact of timing on bidding behavior in procurement auctions of contracts with private costs

We provide a comparison of bidding behavior between multi-round and single-round auctions considering bid lettings for asphalt construction contracts. Using a reduced-form difference-in-difference approach as well as the nonparametric estimation technique proposed by Racine and Li (2004) we find that, bidding is more aggressive in a sequential multi-round setting than in a simultaneous single-round format. We explore potential causes for the bidding difference across formats related to synergies and level of bidder participation.Multi-unit auctions, Procurement auctions

Disadvantaged business enterprise goals in government procurement contracting: an analysis of bidding behavior and costs

Programs that encourage the participation of disadvantaged business enterprises (DBE) as subcontractors have been a part of government procurement auctions for over three decades. In this paper, we examine the impact of a program that requires prime contractors to subcontract out a portion of a highway procurement project to DBE firms. We study how DBE subcontracting requirements affect bidding behavior in federally funded projects. Within a symmetric independent private value framework, we use the equilibrium bidding function to obtain the cost distribution of firms undertaking projects either with or without subcontracting goals. We then use nonparametric estimation methodsto uncover and compare the cost of firms bidding on a class of asphalt projects related to surface treatment in Texas. The analysis shows little differences in the cost structure between auctions that have subcontracting goals and those that do not.Auctions ; Government purchasing

Caring feminist states? Paternalistic feminist foreign policies and the silencing of Indigenous justice claims in Sweden and Canada

The self-identification of Sweden and Canada as exceptionally caring and ethical states committed to the goal of global gender justice has been reinforced through their adoption of feminist foreign policies (FFPs). However, despite the enthusiasm surrounding the potential of feminism as an ethical approach to foreign policy making, critics have drawn attention to the many failings of FFPs that hamper their ability to bring about transformative change. This article posits that the shortcomings of Swedish and Canadian FFPs are rooted in an unacknowledged legacy of colonial power relations. It is from within this history of violence that Swedish and Canadian practices of feminism both “at home” and “abroad” can be seen as a re-articulation of colonialism. Through two illustrative narrative readings of reconciliation efforts, the article examines state provisions of hierarchically imposed, paternalistic expressions of care that silence Indigenous “articulations of self-care.” As such, it addresses a significant gap in the literature on FFPs by highlighting the risk of self-proclaimed “caring” feminist states reproducing colonial power relations within and beyond borders

Automatic 3D bi-ventricular segmentation of cardiac images by a shape-refined multi-task deep learning approach

Deep learning approaches have achieved state-of-the-art performance in cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) image segmentation. However, most approaches have focused on learning image intensity features for segmentation, whereas the incorporation of anatomical shape priors has received less attention. In this paper, we combine a multi-task deep learning approach with atlas propagation to develop a shape-constrained bi-ventricular segmentation pipeline for short-axis CMR volumetric images. The pipeline first employs a fully convolutional network (FCN) that learns segmentation and landmark localisation tasks simultaneously. The architecture of the proposed FCN uses a 2.5D representation, thus combining the computational advantage of 2D FCNs networks and the capability of addressing 3D spatial consistency without compromising segmentation accuracy. Moreover, the refinement step is designed to explicitly enforce a shape constraint and improve segmentation quality. This step is effective for overcoming image artefacts (e.g. due to different breath-hold positions and large slice thickness), which preclude the creation of anatomically meaningful 3D cardiac shapes. The proposed pipeline is fully automated, due to network's ability to infer landmarks, which are then used downstream in the pipeline to initialise atlas propagation. We validate the pipeline on 1831 healthy subjects and 649 subjects with pulmonary hypertension. Extensive numerical experiments on the two datasets demonstrate that our proposed method is robust and capable of producing accurate, high-resolution and anatomically smooth bi-ventricular 3D models, despite the artefacts in input CMR volumes