Hypothetical thinking and the winner's curse: an experimental investigation

Moser, Johannes (2019) Hypothetical thinking and the winner's curse: an experimental investigation. THEORY AND DECISION, 87 (1). pp. 17-56. ISSN 0040-5833, 1573-7187

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Abstract

There is evidence that bidders fall prey to the winner's curse because they fail to extract information from hypothetical eventslike winning an auction. This paper investigates experimentally whether bidders in a common value auction perform better when the requirements for this cognitive issuealso denoted by contingent reasoningare relaxed, leaving all other parameters unchanged. For my underlying research question, I used a lab experiment with two stages. In stage I, the subjects participate in a non-standard common value auction, called the wallet game, in which a naive bidding strategy can lead to both winner's curse and loser's curse. In stage II, the subjects in the treatment group learn whether their initial bid was the winning bid or not and they get the opportunity to change this bid. In this sense, the bidders face the same decision problems as in stage I again, but the need for hypothetical thinking is reduced in stage II. The overall pattern of the data suggests that the problem of irrational over- and underbidding can be weakened by giving the subjects ex ante feedback about their bid, but unlike related studies I also find negative effects of additional information.

Item Type: Article
Uncontrolled Keywords: BELIEFS RATIONALIZE; AUCTIONS; INFORMATION; RELAXATION; EMOTIONS; EXPLAIN; VALUES; PRICE; Hypothetical thinking; Cursed equilibrium; Winner's curse
Subjects: 300 Social sciences > 330 Economics
Divisions: Business, Economics and Information Systems > Institut für Volkswirtschaftslehre und Ökonometrie > Lehrstuhl für Mikroökonomik (Prof. Dr. Andreas Roider)
Depositing User: Dr. Gernot Deinzer
Date Deposited: 06 Apr 2020 07:08
Last Modified: 06 Apr 2020 07:08
URI: https://pred.uni-regensburg.de/id/eprint/26790

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