timber: USFS timber sealed-bid auctions (homogenised bids)

In qdfauction: Nonparametric Quantile Density Estimation and Structural Analysis of First-Price Auctions

USFS timber sealed-bid auctions (homogenised bids)

Description

Homogenised per-unit bids (dollars per unit of timber) in the sealed-bid subsample of the U.S. Forest Service timber auction data assembled by Lu and Perrigne (2008) and deposited in the Journal of Applied Econometrics Data Archive, split by the number of bidders. The bids are **not** the raw bids: observed lot heterogeneity has been removed as described in Details. The announced reserve price is treated as non-binding in the literature using these data.

Usage

timber

Format

A list with two numeric matrices, one row per auction and one column per bidder, in the order in which the archive files record them:

n2

107 auctions with 2 bidders (columns 'bid1', 'bid2')

n3

108 auctions with 3 bidders (columns 'bid1', 'bid2', 'bid3')

Details

Each auction in the archive reports the per-unit bid of every bidder together with two lot characteristics: the appraised per-unit value and the timber volume. Observed heterogeneity in these characteristics is removed before the structural analysis, as is standard for these data (Lu and Perrigne 2008; Haile, Hong and Shum 2003), so that the methods of this package can be applied to bids drawn from a common distribution within each stratum.

Within each stratum (n = 2 and n = 3 separately), the log bid is regressed by ordinary least squares on X = (1, \log(\mathrm{appraisal}), \log(\mathrm{volume})), which is constant within an auction, and every bid is rescaled to the average lot,

\tilde b = b \exp(\bar X' \hat\beta - X' \hat\beta).

The intercept cancels in the difference, so only the slope coefficients matter. The regressions fit the log bids with R^2 = 0.671 for n = 2 (slopes 0.642 and 0.043) and R^2 = 0.554 for n = 3 (slopes 0.553 and 0.070). The stored values are rounded to six decimal places.

The script that rebuilds the object from the archive files is 'data-raw/timber.R' of the package sources; the archive files themselves are not redistributed here.

Source

Journal of Applied Econometrics Data Archive, replication files of Lu, J. and Perrigne, I. (2008). Estimating risk aversion from ascending and sealed-bid auctions: the case of timber auction data. *Journal of Applied Econometrics*, 23, 871–896. \Sexpr[results=rd]{tools:::Rd_expr_doi("10.1002/jae.1032")}; data archive entry \Sexpr[results=rd]{tools:::Rd_expr_doi("10.15456/jae.2022319.0720356598")}. Please cite that paper when using the data.

References

Haile, P. A., Hong, H. and Shum, M. (2003). Nonparametric tests for common values at first-price sealed-bid auctions. Cowles Foundation Discussion Paper 1445.

Examples

data(timber)
fit <- fpa_values(timber$n3, method = "bernstein", bandwidth = "bcv")
summary(fit$values - fit$bids)     # implied markups

qdfauction documentation built on Nov. 10, 2026, 5:07 p.m.