Oil and gas auctions help transact billions of dollars in property sales in the US each year. Value is lost by participants with ineffective strategies. Federal lease auctions have been investigated from public data, but research in this narrow area peaked in the 1980s. Private property auctions did not emerge as a transaction force until nearly a decade later; however, today they dwarf federal lease sales in volume and value. This is the first study to publish research on private auctions and the first to consolidate historical lease research findings with private auction strategies. This dissertation reviews past research, interviews industry professionals, analyzes case histories, conducts game experiments, and synthesizes these views for strategic application. Findings from these efforts include the following: Reducing uncertainty increases bid values; Federal lease bid values tend to be log normal; Aggressive bidding results in a poor portfolio performance; Increasing competition increases bid values; Inexperience increases aggressive bidding; A significant group of companies do not follow consistent auction strategies; Top winning bid drivers are aggressive 3P reserves and commodity prices; Top value risks are commodity prices, capital, and operating expenses; Properties with upside value receive higher bids using sealed-bid auctions; Auction players can bid significantly less and sustain a high win probability; More money is left on the table in federal lease sales than private auctions; Poor data is primary reason auctions fail to complete the transaction; Profit taking is primary reason for selling properties though an auction; Market metrics are useful in valuation analysis; Producing properties receiver higher bids than undeveloped properties with same common knowledge including total proved reserves; Oral auctions receive higher bids than sealed-bid auctions with same common knowledge; Competition increases bid values in sealed-bid auctions; Reserve size does not increase relative value in sealed-bids with same common knowledge other than a magnitude of volume.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1991. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [90]-96).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 139-143).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2002. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI Company.

In this dissertation, I explore bidders’ behavior in multiple auctions which are conducted sequentially or simultaneously. The first and the second chapters examine buyers’ bidding behaviors in an environment of multiple simultaneous auctions and show that the wildly-used assumption of proxy bidding is inappropriate in the multiple auction setting. The first chapter proposes two models which try to describe online auction platforms. One model has a fixed ending time and the other does not. I show that incremental bidding strategy can arise out of equilibrium and weakly dominate the proxy bidding strategy. Late bidding is also discussed. I use the data I collect from eBay to test these theoretical predictions in the second chapter. The estimation results basically support the theory part. Incremental bidders who switch among different auctions are more likely to win and have higher payoffs than proxy bidders. The third essay studies the procurement auctions in the Texas school milk market. I define score functions to map the bids from multiple dimensions to one dimension and analyze the factors that may affect the bids of school milk suppliers. After considering the impacts of these factors including backlogs and cost synergies, I can still find some evidences for existence of collusion among the bidders. / text

Doctor of Philosophy (Economics) / Auctions are an ancient economic institution. Since Vickrey (1961), the development of auction theory has lead to an extremely detailed description of the often desirable characteristics of these simple selling procedures, in the process explaining their enduring popularity. Given the pervasiveness of auctions, the question of how a seller should engineer the rules of these mechanisms to maximize her own profits is a central issue in the organization of markets. The seminal paper of Myerson (1981) shows that when facing buyers with Independent Private Values (IPVs) a standard auction with a specifically selected reserve price (or prices) is optimal, that is, maximizes a seller's expected profits among all conceivable selling mechanisms. In this model, it is assumed that the buyers have perfect information as to the existence of gains from trade. We shall argue that the consequences of this assumption for the design of the optimal auction are not well understood, which motivates our analysis. The three essays of this thesis relax the `known seller valuation' assumption by examining the optimal auction program when the seller (and principal) holds private information representing her reservation value for the good. In the first essay we provide an original technique for comparing ex ante expected profits across mechanisms for a seller facing N>1 potential buyers when all traders hold private information. Our technique addresses mechanisms that cannot be ranked point-by-point through their allocation rules using the Revenue Equivalence Theorem. We find conditions such that the seller's expected profits increase in the slope of each buyer's allocation probability function. This provides new intuition for the fact that a principal does not benefit from holding private information under risk neutrality. Monopoly pricing induces steep probability functions so the seller/principal benefits from announcing a fixed price, and implicitly her private information. An application is presented for the well known k double auction of the bilateral trade literature. In the second and third essays of this thesis, we extend the above framework to allow for informational externalities. Specifically, we allow for the situation in which the seller's private information represents a common value component in buyers' valuations. Thus the seller's private information (say regarding the quality of the good) is of interest to bidders independently of any strategic effects. In recent work Cai, Riley and Ye (2007) have demonstrated that a seller who holds private information about the quality of a good faces an extra consideration in designing an auction; the reserve price signals information to bidders. In a separating equilibrium signalling is costly in the sense that reserves are higher than would be optimal under complete information. We examine the returns to the seller in an English auction from using different types of secret reserve regimes. We find that immediate disclosure of a reserve is preferable to announcement after the auction in the form of a take-it-or-leave-it offer to the winning bidder. Sale occurs less often during the auction for a given reserve price strategy under secret reserve regimes, which increases the incentive for the seller to report more favourable information though the reserve price offer. Separating equilibria involving later announcement therefore generate even lower expected profits to the seller (signalling is more costly) than under immediate disclosure. In the third essay we compare the benchmark signalling equilibrium of immediate disclosure to a screening regime which we call the Right of Refusal. In this extreme form of a secret reserve the seller never announces the reserve price, she simply accepts or rejects the auction price. We find that the Right of Refusal dominates immediate disclosure if the seller's valuation is a sufficient statistic for the private information of interest. Thus a seller with market-relevant private preference information can benefit from not exercising monopoly price setting power. The result also provides conditions under which a competitive screening equilibrium is more efficient than a signalling mechanism. Broadly speaking, screening is better when the common value aspect in the preferences of the informed and uninformed parties are `aligned', and potential gains from trade to the uninformed party are significant. We believe this conclusion to be of particular interest to the design of privatization schemes.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 104-107).

Diss. (sammanfattning) Uppsala : Univ., 2006. / Härtill 4 uppsatser.

Thesis (M.Sc.). / Title from title page of PDF (viewed 2008/01/30). Written for the School of Computer Science. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität Erlangen.