Refereed Economics Papers (hide abstracts) (home)
Daniel Quint, Looking Smart
versus Playing Dumb in Common-Value Auctions, forthcoming, Economic Theory
ABSTRACT. I compare the value of information acquired secretly with information acquired openly prior to a first-price common-value auction. Novel information (information which is independent of the other bidder's private information) is more valuable when learned openly, but redundant information (information the other bidder already has) is more valuable when learned covertly. In a dynamic game where a bidder can credibly signal he is well-informed without disclosing the content of his information, always signaling having novel information, and never signaling having redundant information, is consistent with (but not uniquely predicted by) equilibrium play. Full revelation of any information possessed by the seller increases expected revenue and is uniquely predicted in equilibrium.
Daniel Quint, Unobserved
Correlation in Private-Value Ascending Auctions, Economics Letters 100 (3), September 2008
ABSTRACT. In private-value ascending auctions, the winner's willingness to pay is not observed, leading to underidentification of many econometric models. I calculate tight bounds on expected revenue and optimal reserve price for the case of symmetric and affiliated private values.
Guillermo Caruana, Liran Einav, and Daniel Quint, Multilateral Bargaining with Concession Costs, Journal of Economic Theory 132 (1), January 2007
ABSTRACT. This paper presents a new non-cooperative approach to multilateral bargaining. We consider a demand game with the following additional ingredients: (i) there is an exogenous deadline, by which bargaining has to end; (ii) prior to the deadline, players may sequentially change their demands as often as they like; (iii) changing one's demand is costly, and this cost increases as the deadline gets closer. The game has a unique subgame perfect equilibrium prediction in which agreement is reached immediately and switching costs are avoided. Moreover, this equilibrium is invariant to the particular order and timing in which players make demands. This is important, as multilateral bargaining models are sometimes too sensitive to these particular details. In our context, players with higher concession costs obtain higher shares of the pie; their increased bargaining power stems from their ability to credibly commit to a demand earlier. We discuss how the setup and assumptions are a reasonable description for certain real bargaining situations.
Daniel Quint and Liran Einav, Efficient Entry, Economics Letters 88 (2), August 2005
ABSTRACT. We present a dynamic entry game, in which entry costs become sunk gradually. In equilibrium the most profitable firms enter, as they commit faster not to exit. This rationalizes an equilibrium selection assumption often employed in the empirical entry literature.
Working Papers
Amit Gandhi and Daniel Quint, Nonparametric Methods for
Ascending Auctions with Unobserved Heterogeneity (new version Nov 2009)
ABSTRACT. Standard models of ascending auctions are underidentified when bidders' private valuations may be correlated, as they would be if they were influenced by heterogeneity in objects unobserved by the econometrician. In a model allowing for such heterogeneity, we introduce a nonparametric test for whether variation in the number of bidders across auctions can be treated as exogenous, and show that the policy-relevant parts of the model are identified when variation in n is exogenous.
(In a companion paper coming soon, we discuss three standard models of bidder participation, two of them consistent with the assumption of exogenous n, and introduce a nonparametric test to distinguish between them when there is exogenous variation in the reserve prices of past auctions.)
Daniel Quint, Economics
of Patent Pools When Some (But Not All) Patents Are Essential
Daniel Quint, Economics
of Patent Pools When Some (But Not All) Patents Are Essential - Technical
Appendix
ABSTRACT. Several recent technological standards have been accompanied by patent pools - arrangements to license multiple patentholders' relevant intellectual property as a package. A key distinction made by regulators - between patents essential to a standard and patents with substitutes - has not been addressed in the theoretical literature. I show that pools of essential patents are always welfare-positive, while pools which include nonessential patents can be welfare-negative - even pools which are limited to complementary patents and are stable under compulsory individual licensing. If pools gain commitment power and price as Stackelberg leaders, this reduces, and can even reverse, the gains from welfare-increasing pools.
Yuanchuan Lien and Daniel Quint, Bidding
Reversals in a Multiple-Good Auction with Aggregate Reserve Price
Yuanchuan Lien and
Daniel Quint, Implementing
the Optimal Mechanism using a First-Price Auction with Aggregate Reserve Price:
An Example
ABSTRACT. We examine two-bidder sealed-bid auctions for two objects, one more valuable than the other, and unit demand. The auction has a single "aggregate" reserve price, which must be met by the combination of winning bids, and each bidder can bid on both objects without fear of winning both. A bidder's private values for the two objects are perfectly correlated, so types are one-dimensional. We demonstrate the existence of symmetric equilibria where over some range of types, (i) bidders bid on the lesser object for the purpose of "sabotaging" their (higher) bid on the greater object, and (ii) bids for the lesser object are a decreasing function of valuations.
(In the companion note, we provide an example where the auction considered in "Bidding Reversals..." implements the optimal mechanism.)
Daniel Quint, Unobserved
Correlation in Ascending Auctions: Example and Extensions
(new results Nov 2009)
A companion piece to Quint (2008), "Unobserved Correlation in Private-Value Ascending Auctions" (see above). I give a parameterized example in which seller expected revenue and the optimal reserve price are both strictly decreasing in the parameter for unobserved correlation; show which parts of the main result of the other paper extend from affiliated to conditionally independent private values (and which do not, via a counterexample); and give results on auctions with entry fees and the inference that can be made by observing more losing bids.
Other Publications
Daniel Quint, Patent
Pools, The New Palgrave Dictionary of
Economics Online, Eds. Steven Durlauf and Lawrence Blume, Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008
ABSTRACT.
A patent pool is an agreement by multiple patentholders to share intellectual
property among themselves or to license a portfolio of patents as a package to
outsiders. Patent pools were common in the
Daniel Quint, Leiba Rodman, and Ilya Spitkovsky, New
Cases of Almost Periodic Factorization of Triangular Matrix Functions,