The Dollar Auction Game: A laboratory comparison between Individuals and Groups

By means of a laboratory experiment, this paper aims at studying how individuals and groups behave in a simple game such as the dollar auction. This game is extremely interesting since it induces subjects to fall prey into the paradigm of escalation, which is driven by agents’ commitment to higher and higher bids. Indeed, whenever each participant commits himself to a bid, the lower bidder, moved by the wish to win as well as to defend his prior investment, finds it in his best interest to place a higher bid to overcome his opponent. The latter mechanism may lead subjects to overbid, implying that the winner pays more than the auctioned value. The aim of the paper is to analyze bidder’s behavior, comparing individuals vs. groups’ decisions within the dollar auction framework. We find that groups are closer than individuals to the Nash equilibrium, and that experience reduces the escalation phenomenon, but it has a different impact on winners and losers.