Sequential Auctions with Endogenously Determined Reserve Prices

This paper models an auction game in which two identical licenses for participating in an oligopolistic market are sold in a sequential auction. There is no incumbent. The auction for the first license is a standard first-price, sealed-bid type with an exogenously set reserve price, while the second uses the price of the first unit as the reserve price. This auction rule mimics the license auction for the Turkish Global Mobile Telecommunications in 2000. For some parameter values of the model, this auction setup generates less or equal revenue as selling the monopoly right with the second-price, sealed-bid auction. However, for other parameter values, the seller may get higher revenues.