Private Valuation of a Public Good in Three Auction Mechanisms

We evaluate the impact of three auction mechanisms – the Becker–DeGroot–Marschak (BDM) mechanism, the second-price auction, and the random nth-price auction – in the measurement of private willingness-to-pay and willingness-to-accept for a pure public good. Our results show that the endowment effect can be eliminated with repetitions of the BDM mechanism. Yet, on a logarithmic scale, the random nth-price auction yields the highest speed of convergence to welfare indices' equality. Overall, we observe that subjects value public goods in reference to their private subjective benefit derived from the public good funding.
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