NBER Publications by Young Han Lee

Traditional explanations for the popularity of auctions are efficiency and revenue maximization. We argue that auctions also induce 'overbidding,' i.e., bidding above the buyer's willingness to pay for an item outside the auction. Even if only few buyers overbid, they affect prices and allocations since auctions systematically pick those buyers as winners. We employ a novel approach to identify overbidding, using hand-collected data of eBay auctions with simultaneous fixed prices. We argue that fixed prices for identical items on the same webpage should provide an upper bound for bidders' willingness to pay in the auctions. In a first, detailed data set of board game auctions, we find that, in 42 percent of the auctions, the final price is higher than the simultaneous fixed price. The resu...