Winning bid: how auction theory took the Nobel memorial prize in economics | 拍卖理论为什么能得诺贝尔奖? - FT中文网
登录×
电子邮件/用户名
密码
记住我
请输入邮箱和密码进行绑定操作:
请输入手机号码,通过短信验证(目前仅支持中国大陆地区的手机号):
请您阅读我们的用户注册协议隐私权保护政策,点击下方按钮即视为您接受。
FT英语电台

Winning bid: how auction theory took the Nobel memorial prize in economics
拍卖理论为什么能得诺贝尔奖?

Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson’s work transformed how countries allocate resources in the public interest
保罗·米尔格罗姆和罗伯特·威尔逊的工作改变了国家为公共利益分配资源的方式。
00:00

If you and I were to bid against each other in a charity auction for, say, dinner with Princess Marie of Denmark, little would have to be explained about how the details of the auction work. One of us values the prospect more, would pay more, and would win.

But if you and I were bidding against each other for the joint value of the cash in our wallets, the auction becomes far more intriguing. I know only what is in my wallet and you know only what is in yours. Each of us should take a keen interest in what the other is willing to pay, since it is a clear signal of the value of the prize.

The charity auction for an evening with Princess Marie would be described by an economist as a private value auction. I have my own idea of its value, you have yours and the only question is whose value — and thus whose bid — is higher.

The wallet auction is known as a common value auction. The cash in the wallets is worth the same to each of us. To add to the intrigue, each of us has a piece of the puzzle but neither of us know everything about the true value.

This is a hint of the complexities involved in the ostensibly simple process of running an auction, or bidding in one. Auctions date back a long time. Almost 2,500 years ago, the historian Herodotus described men bidding for the most attractive wives in Babylon. Auctions also appear in Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, as well as in Samuel Pepys’s diaries.

Presumably, the auction is almost as old as the marketplace itself. It was no doubt invented many times over in markets when some buyer offered to pay four denarii per jar for fresh honey, and the man next to him said, “don’t settle for that price — I’ll give you five”.

The economist William Vickrey shared a Nobel memorial prize in 1996 in part for his foundational work on the theory of auctions. But Vickrey’s work, while elegant to the point of beauty, does not give economists the tools to analyse the complex, practical auction design problems that real world settings require.

Into the breach stepped Robert Wilson and his former student Paul Milgrom, the Stanford professors who today have shared the 2020 Nobel memorial prize in economic sciences “for improvements to auction theory and inventions of new auction formats”.

Paul Klemperer, a leading auction theorist at Oxford university, says that even the Nobel citation is hardly praise enough. “These were not just ‘improvements’. Robert Wilson is the father of practical auction design,” he said, “and Paul Milgrom could easily have won a second Nobel Prize for his work on the economics of information”.

undefined

Beyond the beauty of auction theory, the reason this matters is that governments have turned to auctions over the past few decades to allocate resources including logging rights, mineral exploration rights and the rights to use particular frequencies of radio spectrum for television or mobile phones. The alternative — handing out the resources cheaply to whoever spins the most plausible story — offers some conveniences to both buyers and politicians but is hardly in the public interest.

A well-designed auction forces bidders to reveal the truth about their own estimate of the prize’s value. At the same time, the auction shares that information with the other bidders. And it sets the price accordingly. It is quite a trick.

But, in practice, it is a difficult trick to get right. In the 1990s, the US Federal government turned to auction theorists — Milgrom and Wilson prominent among them — for advice on auctioning radio-spectrum rights. “The theory that we had in place had only a little bit to do with the problems that they actually faced,” Milgrom recalled in an interview in 2007. “But the proposals that were being made by the government were proposals that we were perfectly capable of analysing the flaws in and improving.”

The basic challenge with radio-spectrum auctions is that many prizes are on offer, and bidders desire only certain combinations. A TV company might want the right to use Band A, or Band B, but not both. Or the right to broadcast in the east of England, but only if they also had the right to broadcast in the west. Such combinatorial auctions are formidably challenging to design, but Milgrom and Wilson got to work.

Joshua Gans, a former student of Milgrom’s who is now a professor at the University of Toronto, praises both men for their practicality. Their theoretical work is impressive, he said, “but they realised that when the world got too complex, they shouldn’t adhere to proving strict theorems”.

The peak of the excitement around spectrum auctions came at the turn of the century, when European countries auctioned spectrum rights at the height of dotcom mania. But auctions continue to be used to allocate scarce resources, and there is ample room to use them in future — for example, allocating the rights to fly to hub airports or the right to emit carbon dioxide, deciding which environmental projects should receive subsidies, or providing central bank loans to the banking system in times of stress.

Spectrum auctions have already raised many billions of dollars across the world; Milgrom, Wilson and another auction designer, Preston McAfee, were awarded a Golden Goose Award in 2014 — the award celebrates apparently obscure research that yields large social benefits.

And it is not just governments who use auctions. Every time you type a search term into Google, the advertisements you see alongside the results are there because they won a complex auction. Auctions helped to allocate the infrastructure on which the internet runs. Now they help to allocate our attention.

Tim Harford’s new book is “How to Make the World Add Up”

版权声明:本文版权归FT中文网所有,未经允许任何单位或个人不得转载,复制或以任何其他方式使用本文全部或部分,侵权必究。

前保守党财政大臣告诫工党现任勿看衰英国前景

杰里米•亨特表示,英国在关键增长领域表现强劲,应该停止贬低自己。

Lex专栏:游戏机制造商在低迷市场中表现强劲

虽然游戏机老化通常意味着游戏公司收入持续下降,但多年未推出新产品的索尼和任天堂等游戏公司仍表现强劲。

为年度展望报告辩护

巴克兰:定期回顾投资框架以及进行经济和市场展望是一项良好的做法。

企业长寿的奥秘为何对投资者很重要

长寿公司除了具有凝聚力、宽容度和财务保守等特征外,几乎没有什么共同点。
1天前

特朗普上台能否解决加拿大经济疲软问题?

经济学家表示,来自美国的冲击可能会使该国经济摆脱麻木状态。

对在线教育集团的投资在AI兴起后急剧下降

教育科技公司融资创十年新低,该行业在疫情结束后难以维持订户增长。
设置字号×
最小
较小
默认
较大
最大
分享×