【Title】Preplay Commitment in First-price Auctions 

【Speaker】Dr.Yunjian Xu, Singapore University of Technology 

【Host】Dr. Wanshan Zhu

【Time】January 02, 2014, 13:30-14:30 (Thursday)

【Location】Room 510, Shun-de Building

【Abstract】We study a variation of the standard single-item sealed-bid first-price auction wherein all bidders know one another’s valuations, and one bidder (the leader) publicly commits to a (possibly mixed) strategy before the others submit their bids. For the case where the leader’s valuation is the highest or the Second highest (including, e.g., when there are only two bidders), we fully characterize the commitment that maximizes the expected payoff of the leader. In this case, both the leader and the bidder with the highest valuation among the other bidders strictly benefit from the commitment -- each obtains an expected payoff higher than that achieved at a Nash equilibrium of the standard first-price auction.

【Bio】Yunjian Xu completed his PhD degree at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems of MIT. After graduation, he spent one year in the Center for the Mathematics of Information at California Institute of Technology as a postdoctoral scholar. In Aug 2013, he joined the Engineering Systems and Design pillar at Singapore University of Technology and Design as an assistant professor. His research blends concepts, models and techniques from optimization theory, probability theory and game theory, and spans a wide range of applied fields including electricity markets, Cournot oligopolies, cloud computing markets, and first-price auctions. He is a recipient of the MIT-Shell Energy fellowship.