Joonsuk Lee Assistant Professor Department of Economics University of California, Davis One Shields Avenue Davis, CA 95616-8578 Email: epflee@ucdavis.edu Office: (530) 752-8727

Curriculum Vitae [PDF] Working Papers A Structural Analysis of Wholesale Used-car Auctions: Nonparametric Estimation and Testing of Dealers' Valuations with Unknown Number of Bidders (with Kyoo il Kim, University of Minnesota) [PDF] Wholesale used-car markets have widely utilized ascending auctions for trading dealers' inventories. To study the latent demand structure of these markets, one needs to recover the underlying valuations of dealers from the bidding data observed at the auctions. Exploiting a new, rich data set on a wholesale used-car auction, we estimate the distribution of bidders' valuations nonparametrically under the symmetric independent private values (IPV) framework and nonparametrically test the validity of the IPV assumption. We show the testability of the symmetric IPV when the number of potential bidders is unknown and even when it can vary across different auctions endogenously. This means our test can allow for endogenous participations to auctions. Then, we develop a nonparametric test of such valuation paradigm. Unlike previous work on ascending auctions, our estimation and testing methods use more information from observed losing bids by virtue of the rich structure of our data. We find that the null hypothesis of IPV is not rejected with our sample after controlling for observed auction heterogeneity and therefore our estimation result is a good approximation of the underlying distribution of dealers' valuations. Constructing an Auction Price Index for Wholesale Used Car Markets: A Hedonic Approach [PDF] Teaching at UC Davis     Graduate Industrial Organization     Undergraduate Industrial Organization     Undergraduate Intermediate Microeconomics