现代产业经济学系列讲座第198期

时   间：2021年4月27日（周二）13:30-15:30

地   点：复旦大学管理学院史带楼603室

题   目：Optimal Bid Caps in Noisy Contests

主讲人：吴泽南 北京大学 助理教授

主持人：陆卓然 复旦大学管理学院 助理教授

摘    要：This paper studies optimal bid caps in a multi-player generalized lottery contest, in which a higher bid improves one's winning odds but does not ensure a win. The bid cap is allowed to be either rigid or flexible. The former imposes outright restrictions on players' bids, while the latter specifies a tax rate for every level of bid and generates tax revenue in equilibrium. A designer commits to the bid cap scheme prior to the competition to maximize a weighted sum between players' aggregate bid and the overall tax revenue she collects through the cap. Our analysis characterizes the properties of the optimum and spells out the conditions for the various optimal bid cap schemes. Our results stand in sharp contrast to studies based on two-player all-pay auctions (e.g., Che and Gale, 1998, 2006; Kaplan and Wettstein, 2006): We show that with a sufficiently noisy winner-selection mechanism, a rigid bid is always suboptimal regardless of the designer's preference, and no cap is optimal when the designer maximizes only the aggregate bid. Based on our analysis, we develop a rationale that bridges noisy contests and all-pay auctions and sheds light on the nature of bid caps in different contexts.

主讲人简介：Zenan Wu is an assistant professor at Peking University. His research focuses on the field of applied microeconomic theory; specifically, contest theory, insurance markets, and behavioral economics. His research has been published in journals, including Theoretical Economics, Journal of Economic Theory, RAND Journal of Economics, and Journal of Economics & Management Strategy. He received the Bachelor’s degree in Economics from Tsinghua University in 2008 and Ph.D. in Economics from University of Pennsylvania in 2015.

产业经济学系

2021-4-23