Thanks. I was hoping to get real-world examples, but yeah this is interesting and does seem structurally similar. Though, an auction sort of seems like it’s structurally assuming “total inelasticity”, like there’s just a fixed pile of goods that you’re auctioning off (and then external to that we can compare two auctions with different goods), contrasting to markets, which I imagine are mostly at least somewhat supply-elastic (though maybe that’s a wrong imagination, and certainly on shorter time-scales there’s lots of supply inelasticity). I can’t immediately think of examples where anyone is bidding, in a fixed-supply auction setting, on goods over which they have multiple overlapping non-linearly-combining utilities. Like, are the ever companies literally bidding on contracts, where they have non-linear utilities over combinations, with a Braess-like combinatorial pattern? I don’t see why that would happen in practice; it makes sense to want either (B and B’) or (C and C’), because, say, the capability to fulfill contract B overlaps with the capability to fulfill B’..… oh okay maybe this would happen if then someone invents something that makes fulfilling C and B’ much more overlapping than before? Does that ever actually happen?
Thanks. I was hoping to get real-world examples, but yeah this is interesting and does seem structurally similar. Though, an auction sort of seems like it’s structurally assuming “total inelasticity”, like there’s just a fixed pile of goods that you’re auctioning off (and then external to that we can compare two auctions with different goods), contrasting to markets, which I imagine are mostly at least somewhat supply-elastic (though maybe that’s a wrong imagination, and certainly on shorter time-scales there’s lots of supply inelasticity). I can’t immediately think of examples where anyone is bidding, in a fixed-supply auction setting, on goods over which they have multiple overlapping non-linearly-combining utilities. Like, are the ever companies literally bidding on contracts, where they have non-linear utilities over combinations, with a Braess-like combinatorial pattern? I don’t see why that would happen in practice; it makes sense to want either (B and B’) or (C and C’), because, say, the capability to fulfill contract B overlaps with the capability to fulfill B’..… oh okay maybe this would happen if then someone invents something that makes fulfilling C and B’ much more overlapping than before? Does that ever actually happen?