How could the Nobel Prize be awarded for something as weird as auction theory?
Malin Arve and Eirik Gaard Kristiansen: Perhaps everybody has not considered that they actually have taken part in an auction.
The probability that a firm overestimating the value of a contract is actually awarded the contract may be high. But so is the probability that the delivery is terminated and the firm goes bankrupt.
This literally happened in a rather stinking affair in Oslo some years ago. If they had asked Wilson about what the winner's curse was, maybe this would have been avoided? For the sake of both the local government and the firm, Malin Arve and Eirik Gaard Kristiansen write.
Their feature article Hvordan kunne nobelprisen i økonomi gå til noe så sært som auksjonsteori? (in Norwegian) was published in Bergens Tidende on 17 October, 2020.