Equitable Pricing in Auctions
<|reference_start|>Equitable Pricing in Auctions: How does auction design affect the division of surplus among buyers in auctions? We propose a parsimonious measure for equity and apply it to multi-unit auctions, in which unit demand buyers with private-common values pay mixtures of uniform and pay-as-bid pricing. We show that uniform pricing is equity-optimal if and only if buyers have a pure common value. Surprisingly, however, with pure private values, pay-as-bid pricing may not be optimal, and uniform pricing can achieve higher surplus equity. We turn to the class of log-concave signal distributions and provide bounds on the equity-optimal pricing rule.<|reference_end|>
@article{finster2024equitable,
    title={Equitable Auctions},
    author={Simon Finster, Patrick Loiseau, Simon Mauras, Mathieu Molina, Bary
  Pradelski},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.07799},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2403.07799},
    primaryClass={econ.TH cs.GT}
}