Auctioning and bargaining: An econometric study of timber auctions with secret reservation prices

This article considers a first-price sealed-bid auction at which the seller’s reservation price is not announced in advance. We allow for a second round of bargaining and consider the Nash bargaining outcome when the object is unsold after the auctioning round. We characterize the bidders’ and seller’s Bayesian Nash equilibrium strategies. The distributions of the buyers’ and seller’s private values are estimated by nonlinear least squares from auction data on standing timber, while solving numerically the differential equations characterizing the seller’s and buyers’ equilibrium strategies. The performance of the estimated model is then compared to a model in which the players behave myopically.