【Micro Seminar】Auction Design with Ambiguity: Optimality of the First-Price Auction
2025/11/14
研討會日期 : 2025-11-14
時間 : 14:30
主講人 : Professor Youngwoo Koh
地點 : Conference Room B110
主持人 : Professor Changhyun Kwak
演講者簡介 : Professor Youngwoo Koh received his Ph.D. in Economics from Columbia University in 2013. He is currently an Associate Professor at Seoul National University. His research interests are Microeconomic Theory, Market Design, and Mechanism Design.
演講摘要 : We study the optimal auction design problem when bidders are ambiguity averse and follow the max-min expected utility model. Each bidder's set of priors consists of beliefs that are close to the seller's belief, where "closeness" is defined by a divergence. For a given allocation rule, we show that optimal transfers belong to a specific class of transfers, termed win-lose dependent transfers, in which bidders' transfers upon winning and losing depend only on their own types but not on their opponents' type reports. This result effectively reduces the infinite-dimensional problem of identifying an optimal transfer function into a two-dimensional problem of determining two constants—one for winning and another for losing. Solving this reduced problem, we show that among efficient mechanisms without transfers to losing bidders, the first-price auction is optimal, thereby outperforming other auction formats such as the second price auction. We also discuss how the structure of the set of priors is related to the revenue ranking between the first- and second-price auctions.
