UCLA

My dissertation contributes to the structural nonparametric econometrics of auctions and contests with incomplete information. It consists of three chapters.

The first chapter investigates the identification and estimation of an all-pay auction where the object is allocated to the player with the highest bid, and every bidder pays his bid regardless of whether he wins or not. As a baseline model, I consider the setting, where one object is allocated among several risk-neutral participants with independent private values (IPV); however, I also show how the model can be extended to the multiunit case. Moreover, the model is not confined to the IPV paradigm, and I further consider the case where the bidders’ private values are affiliated (APV). In both IPV and APV settings, I prove the identification and derive the consistent estimators of the distribution of the bidders’ valuations using a structural approach similar to that of Guerre et al. (2000). Finally, I consider the model with risk-averse bidders. I prove that in general the model in this set-up is not identified even in the semi-parametric case where the utility function of the bidders is restricted to belong to the class of functions with constant absolute risk aversion (CARA).

The second chapter proves the identification and derives the asymptotically normal estimator of a nonparametric contest of incomplete information with uncertainty. By uncertainty, I mean that the contest success function is not only determined by the bids of the players, but also by the variable, which I call uncertainty, with a nonparametric distribution, unknown to the researcher, but known to the bidders. This work is the first to consider the incomplete information contest with a nonparametric contest success function. The limiting case of the model when there is no uncertainty is an all-pay auction considered in the first chapter. The model with two asymmetric players is examined. First, I recover the distribution of uncertainty using the information on win outcomes and bids. Next, I adopt the structural approach of Guerre et al. (2000) to obtain the distribution of the bidders’ valuations (or types). As an empirical application, I study the U.S. House of Representatives elections. The model provides a method to disentangle two sources of incumbency advantage: a better reputation, and better campaign financing. The former is characterized by the distribution of uncertainty and the latter by the difference in the distributions of candidates’ types. Besides, two counterfactual analyses are performed: I show that the limiting expenditure dominates public campaign financing in terms of lowering total campaign spending as well as the incumbent’s winning probability.

The third chapter is a semiparametric version of the second chapter. In the case when the data is sparse, some restrictions on the nonparametric structure need to be put. In this work, I prove the identification and derive the consistent estimator of a contest of incomplete information, in which an object is allocated according to the serial contest success function. As in previous chapters, I recover the distribution of the bidders’ valuations from the data on observed bids using a structural approach similar to that of Guerre et al. (2000) and He and Huang (2018). As a baseline model, I consider the symmetric contest. Further, the model is extended to account for the bidders’ asymmetry.