Equitable Auctions

Abstract

We initiate the study of how auction design affects the division of surplus among buyers. We propose a parsimonious measure for equity and apply it to the family of standard auctions for homogeneous goods. Our surplus-equitable mechanism is efficient, Bayesian-Nash incentive compatible, and achieves surplus parity among winners ex-post. The uniform-price auction is equity-optimal if and only if buyers have a pure common value. Against intuition, the pay-as-bid auction is not always preferred in terms of equity if buyers have pure private values. In auctions with price mixing between pay-as-bid and uniform prices, we provide prior-free bounds on the equity-preferred pricing rule under a common regularity condition on signals.