Risk aversion and overbidding in first price sealed bid auctions: new experimental evidence (DATA SET)

The data comes from "Füllbrunn, S., Janssen, D. J., & Weitzel, U. (2019). Risk aversion and overbidding in first price sealed bid auctions: new experimental evidence. Economic Inquiry, 57(1), 631-647." and contains the decisions of students in a lab experiments.

The experiment considers whether risk attitudes affect bidding behaviour in first-price sealed bid auctions. In each session, we first elicited their risk attitude using the BRET task. Then, we ordered the subjects based on their risk attitudes and built market groups based on this order. Ranks 1-4 formed the first group, ranks 5-8 the second group, etc. These groups participated in 50 first-price sealed bid auctions with the same setup and even the same random draw of the values. While in auctions 1-25, the subjects only learned whether they won, they realized the winning bid in auctions 26-50. Hence, the losers observe the missed opportunity and could potentially react to such information (regret).

With the design, we wanted to figure out whether High-Risk-Aversion Groups, i.e. groups with subjects who could be categorised as risk averse, have a stronger tendency to overbid, compared to Low-Risk -Aversion Groups, i.e. subjects who could be categorised as risk seeking. That is indeed what we found.

The paper provides detailed information about the experiment and instructions. The Excel file contains data, one example, and a codebook explaining the variables.