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Discussion Paper

Bidding in Auctions with Multiplicative Lognormal Errors: An Example

Auction models with lognormally-distributed multiplicative errors are used extensively in models of mineral lease sales. Equilibrium strategies are typically difficult to calculate; multiplicative strategies are often used as approximations. An example based on a federal offshore oil lease sale shows that multiplicative strategies may be quite far from being in equilibrium. However, under a special form of repetition, such strategies converge very rapidly to an equilibrium.