Order Statistics Approaches to Unobserved Heterogeneity in Auctions

We establish nonparametric identification of auction models with continuous unobserved heterogeneity using three consecutive order statistics of bids. We then propose sieve maximum likelihood estimators for estimating the unobserved heterogeneity distribution and the value distributions jointly. Lastly, we apply our methodology to a novel dataset from judicial auctions in China. Our estimates suggest substantial gains from accounting for unobserved heterogeneity in reserve prices. We propose a simple scheme that achieves nearly optimal revenue by using the appraisal value as the reserve price.