An Empirical Study of Decentralized Institutions of Monopoly Restraint

Abstract

Several decades ago, Abba Lerner (1944) suggested the possibility that where markets are imperfectly competitive, due, for example, to there being too few sellers (or buyers), a central authority or marketing agency might by “counterspeculation” create the conditions whereby efficient resource allocation could be achieved. However, it remained for Vickrey (1961) to propose a scheme for operationalizing Lerner's concept of “counterspeculation”; this scheme has since been recognized as an example of an incentive compatible mechanism conceptually akin to the Clarke (1971) and Groves (1973) mechanism for demand revelation in public-good decision making. Vickrey's mechanism (pp. 9–14), using a marketing agency to process individual reported supply and demand curves, provided no direct incentives for misrepresentation of supply and demand, but because it was thought by Vickrey (perhaps correctly) to be impractical, he turned (pp. 14–29) to an analysis of various auctioning methods which represented realized or realizable institutions. His analysis showed that the English oral auction and the second-price sealed-bid auction (in which the high bidder wins, but pays a price equal to the second highest bid) were examples of decentralized price mechanisms which created incentives for efficient (Pareto-optimal) resource allocation even where numbers were few. In contrast, the Dutch descending bid and first-price sealed-bid auction (the high bidder wins and pays what he bids) were examples of decentralized mechanisms which created incentives for misrepresentation of demand and for Pareto-inefficient resource allocation.

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