Price Discovery in Auctions: how different types of auctions aggregate dispersed information
Price Discovery in Auctions: how different types of auctions aggregate dispersed information
In many auctions, the true value of the object or contract that is being bid on is not fully known to bidders: the future value of a company’s stock in an IPO, the value of an oil or gas lease, the future resale value of a house, the true cost of building a highway in a tender. In the course of an auction, participants submit bids based on their private information about the value; thus the auction aggregates information dispersed among the participants and can potentially discover the value unknown to any individual participant. Using examples from numerous types of auctions, Professor Songzi Du will explain how price discovery works in a traditional auction, such as an IPO auction. He will outline the winner’s curse, a common feature of auctions with imperfect information, and explain how it biases the pricing. Finally, he will introduce a new auction design, the market order mechanism, and explain how it overcomes some of these problems to create more reliable information.
About the Speaker
Professor Songzi Du has been a faculty member at University of California San Diego since 2018; prior to that he taught at Simon Fraser University from 2012 to 2018. He obtained his PhD from Stanford University in 2012. His research focuses on mechanism design and the study of market microstructure. He has published several papers in Econometrica, as well the Review of Economic Studies, the Journal of Finance and the Journal of Economic Theory.
