An Example of a Multi-Object Auction Game

Concurrent auctions of several objects are traditionally analyzed as if they were independent single-object auctions. Such an approximation may be very crude if bidders have budgetary restrictions, capacity constraints, or, in general, have non-linear utility functions. This paper presents a very simple multi-object auction for which explicit equilibrium strategies can be calculated; these equilibrium strategies have several qualitative characteristics arising from the multi-object nature of the example and therefore not present in typical single-object auctions. In particular, these results suggest that the observed variance in bids for offshore oil leases is not solely due to bidder uncertainty, but also to the method of auction currently employed.