Endogenous shareholding auctions

Abstract

We introduce endogenous shareholding auctions for production economies where a monopolist must elicit consumer demand in order to determine price and quantity. Each of these auctions has the property that the auction's profit is distributed across the monopolist and the consumers in accordance with ownership shares that are determined over the course of the auction. We characterize this class, and a larger class, on the basis of standard axioms. Finally, we investigate optimal auctions according to both prior-free domination and subjective expected welfare.