The Efficiency of Dynamic, Post-Auction Bargaining: Evidence from Wholesale Used-Auto Auctions

Abstract

This study quantifies the eciency of a real-world bargaining game with two-sided incomplete information. Myerson and Satterthwaite (1983) and Williams (1987) derived the theoretical ecient frontier for bilateral trade under two-sided uncertainty, but little is known about how well real-world bargaining performs relative to the frontier. The setting is wholesale used-auto auctions, an 80 billion industry where buyers and sellers participate in alternating-oer bargaining when the auction price fails to reach a secret reserve price. Using 300,000 auction/bargaining sequences, this study nonparametrically estimates bounds on the distributions of buyer and seller valuations and then estimates where bargaining outcomes lie relative to the ecient frontier. Findings indicate that the observed auction-followed-by-bargaining mechanism is quite ecient, achieving 88‐96% of the surplus and 92‐99% of the trade volume which can be achieved on the ecient frontier.