Identification and Estimation of Auction Model with Two-Dimensional Unobserved Heterogeneity

This paper investigates the empirical importance of allowing for multi-dimensional sources of unobserved heterogeneity in auction models with private information. It in turn develops the estimation procedure that recovers the distribution of private information in the presence of two distinct sources of unobserved heterogeneity. It is shown that this estimation procedure identifies components of the model and produces uniformly consistent estimators of these components. The estimation procedure is applied to the data from highway procurement. The results of the estimation indicate that allowing for two-dimensional unobserved heterogeneity may significantly affect the results of estimation as well as policy-relevant instruments derived from the estimated distributions of bidders’ costs.