Market Equilibrium in the Presence of Green Consumers and Responsible Firms: a Comparative Statics Analysis

This paper analyzes how the interaction between green consumers and responsible firms affects the market equilibrium. The main result is that a higher responsibility by both producers and consumers can have different impacts on the efficiency of the firms' abatement activity, depending on the nature of the cleaning costs. When the abatement costs are fixed, the efficiency of the clean-up effort is always increasing in their degree of responsibility. On the other hand, when the abatement costs are variable, a higher level of responsibility may reduce social welfare. Finally, the first best allocation is never reached, even in the presence of the highest credible level of responsibility of both consumers and producers.Green Consumers, Corporate Social Responsibility, Vertical Differentiation

Information revelation in procurement auctions with two-sided asymmetric information

A buyer needs to procure a good from either of two potential suppliers offering differentiated products and with privately observed costs. The buyer privately observes the own valuations for the products and (ex ante) decides how much of this information should be revealed to suppliers before they play a first score auction. We show that the more significant is each supplier’s private information on the own cost, the less information the buyer should reveal. Part of our analysis is linked to the comparison between a first and a second price auction in an asymmetric setup with a distribution shift.Asymmetric auctions

Market Equilibrium in the Presence of Green Consumers and Responsible Firms: A Comparative Statics Analysis

This paper analyzes how the interaction between green consumers and responsible firms affects the market equilibrium. The main result is that a higher responsibility by both producers and consumers can have different impacts on the efficiency of the firms’ abatement activity, depending on the nature of the cleaning costs. When the abatement costs are fixed, the efficiency of the clean-up effort is always increasing in their degree of responsibility. On the other hand, when the abatement costs are variable, a higher level of responsibility may reduce social welfare. Finally, the first best allocation is never reached, even in the presence of the highest credible level of responsibility of both consumers and producers.Green Consumers, Corporate Social Responsibility, Vertical Differentiation

Revenue Comparison in Asymmetric Auctions with Discrete Valuations

We consider an asymmetric auction setting with two bidders such that the valuation of each bidder has a binary support. We prove that in this context the second price auction yields a higher expected revenue than the first price auction for a broad set of parameter values, although the opposite result is common in the literature on asymmetric auctions. For instance, the second price auction is superior both when a bidder’s valuation is more uncertain that the valuation of the other bidder, and in case of a not too large distribution shift or rescaling. In addition, we show that in some cases the revenue in the first price auction decreases when all the valuations increase [in doing so, we correct a claim in Maskin and Riley (1985), and we derive the bidders’ preferences between the two auctions.Asymmetric auctions, First price auctions, Second price auctions.

A note on information revelation in procurement auctions

This paper is about a procurement auction setting, introduced in Gal-Or, Gal-Or and Dukes (2007), in which suppliers offer differentiated products and the buyer needs to decide whether to reveal or not to the suppliers the own preferences for the various products. We provide some technical remarks and complements to the analysis of Gal-Or, Gal-Or and Dukes (2007), and an extension to the case of risk averse suppliers.Information Revelation, Logconcavity, Risk Aversion

Information Disclosure in Procurement Auctions with Horizontally Differentiated Suppliers

This work studies a model of multidimensional auction in which a buyer needs to procure a given good from either of two potential suppliers whose quality is the buyer's private information and whose production costs are heterogeneous. Costs asymmetries constitute a novelty in this framework and extend e.g. the model of Gal-Or et al. (2007). We compare the outcomes of different procurement policies from the viewpoint of both efficiency and the buyer's payoff. A trade-off between efficiency and rent-extraction emerges. The buyer will maximize her expected utility by selecting a first score auction and either concealing or privately revealing suppliers'quality - the optimal choice depending on the degree of heterogeneity in suppliers' costs and qualities. However, neither of these auction mechanisms will be efficient: efficiency calls for a second score auction or a first score auction with public disclosure of suppliersquality. The findings hinge on the equivalence between auction models and models of horizontal differentiation and take advantage of results for asymmetric auctions developed by Maskin & Riley (2000).multidimensional auctions, procurement policies, endogenous information, horizontal di¤erentiation, asymmetric auctions.

Dynamics in Non-Binding Procurement Auctions with Boundedly Rational Bidders

We study a procurement auction recently analysed by Gal-Or et al. (2007). In this auction game the buyer ranks different bids on the basis of both the prices submitted and the quality of each bidder that is her private information. We emphasise the similarity between this model and existing models of competition in horizontally differentiated markets. Finally we illustrate conditions for the existence and the stability of such equilibrium. To this end we extend the model to a dynamic setting in which a sequence of independent auctions takes place. We assume bidders have bounded rationality in a twofold sense. On one hand, they use an underparametrized model of their competitors’ behaviour, best responding to expectations on average bids rather than keeping track of the entire vector of competitors’ bids. On the other they update expectations adaptively. In a general framework with more than two bidders the system may fail to converge to the steady state, i.e. to the symmetric Nash equilibrium of the original game.Non-binding auctions, Product differentiation, Hotelling Duopoly, Expectations, Stability of steady states