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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

The Relation Between Variance And Information Rents In Auctions, Brett Katzman, Julian Reif, Jesse Schwartz May 2014

The Relation Between Variance And Information Rents In Auctions, Brett Katzman, Julian Reif, Jesse Schwartz

Jesse A. Schwartz

This paper examines the conventional wisdom, expressed in McAfee and McMillan's (1987) widely cited survey paper on auctions, that links increased variance of bidder values to increased information rent. We find that although the conventional wisdom does indeed hold in their (1986) model of a linear contract auction, this relationship is an artifact of that particular model and cannot be generalized. Using Samuelson's (1987) model, which is similar but allows for unobservable costs, we show that increased variance does not always imply increased information rent. Finally, we give the appropriate measure of dispersion (different from variance) that provides the link …


Collusive Bidding In The Fcc Spectrum Auctions, Peter Cramton, Jesse Schwartz May 2014

Collusive Bidding In The Fcc Spectrum Auctions, Peter Cramton, Jesse Schwartz

Jesse A. Schwartz

This paper describes the bid signaling that occurred in many of the FCC spectrum auctions. Bidders in these auctions bid on numerous spectrum licenses simultaneously, with bidding remaining open on all licenses until no bidder is willing to raise the bid on any license. Simultaneous open bidding allows bidders to send messages to their rivals, telling them on which licenses to bid and which to avoid. This “code bidding” occurs when one bidder tags the last few digits of its bid with the market number of a related license. We examine how extensively bidders signaled each other with retaliating bids …


Wage Bargaining Under The National Labor Relations Act, Jesse Schwartz, Quan Wen May 2014

Wage Bargaining Under The National Labor Relations Act, Jesse Schwartz, Quan Wen

Jesse A. Schwartz

Sections 8(a)(3) and 8(a)(5) of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) prohibit the management of a firm from unilaterally increasing the wage during contract negotiations without the union's approval. We show how the management can strategically increase the wage during negotiations without violating the NLRA. Increasing the wage during negotiations will upset the union's incentive to strike and decrease the union's bargaining power, thereby shrinking the set of equilibrium contracts in the firm's favor. Indeed, as the union becomes more patient, the set of equilibrium wages converges to the best equilibrium outcome to the firm.


Dominant Strategy Implementation With A Convex Product Space Of Valuations, Katherine Cuff, Sunghoon Hong, Jesse Schwartz, Quan Wen, John Weymark May 2014

Dominant Strategy Implementation With A Convex Product Space Of Valuations, Katherine Cuff, Sunghoon Hong, Jesse Schwartz, Quan Wen, John Weymark

Jesse A. Schwartz

A necessary and sufficient condition for dominant strategy implementability when preferences are quasilinear is that, for every individual i and every choice of the types of the other individuals, all k-cycles in i's allocation graph have nonnegative length for every integer k ≥ 2. Saks and Yu (Proceedings of the 6th ACM conference on electronic commerce (EC'05), pp 286-293, 2005) have shown that when the number of outcomes is finite and i's valuation type space is convex, nonnegativity of the length of all 2-cycles is sufficient for the nonnegativity of the length of all k-cycles. In this article, it is …


Wage Negotiation Under Good Faith Bargaining, Jesse Schwartz, Quan Wen May 2014

Wage Negotiation Under Good Faith Bargaining, Jesse Schwartz, Quan Wen

Jesse A. Schwartz

We study the wage negotiation model of Haller and Holden (1990) and Fernandez and Glazer (1991) under the "Good Faith Bargaining" (GFB) rule, where a party may not demand more than it has previously demanded. The GFB rule significantly restricts feasible strategies, but at the same time, makes the game non-stationary and the analysis complicated. We introduce a state-dependent backward induction that generalizes Shaked and Sutton (1984) to characterize the equilibrium payoffs. We find that the GFB rule eliminates the union's credibility to strike. Without the strikes, the union's strategic opportunities during disagreement disappear, so that there is a unique …


Collusive Bidding: Lessons From The Fcc Spectrum Auctions, Peter Cramton, Jesse Schwartz Apr 2000

Collusive Bidding: Lessons From The Fcc Spectrum Auctions, Peter Cramton, Jesse Schwartz

Jesse A. Schwartz

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) spectrum auctions use a simultaneous ascending auction design. Bidders bid on numerous communication licenses simultaneously, with bidding remaining open on all licenses until no bidder is willing to bid higher on any license. With full revelation of bidding information, simultaneous open bidding allows bidders to send messages to their rivals, telling them on which licenses to bid and which to avoid. These strategies can help bidders coordinate a division of the licenses, and enforce the proposed division by directed punishments. We explore the extent that bidders signaled each other with retaliating bids in recent FCC …