Winner's Curse and "The Price is Right!"

I was thinking about the competition between Exxon and a joint Chinese/Ghanan venture to bid for rights to the newly discovered Jubilee oil field. Is it likely that Exxon, an undoubtedly experienced bidder, put in a risk neutral or even a loss free bid on the field and will the Chinese company, with presumably less experience, win but suffer the winner's curse? If the Chinese company is backed by the Chinese government, will that backing make them willing to risk (or even take an intentional) loss in order to secure access to the oil? Or was Exxon putting in a non competitive bid to exploit Ghana?




The thought "Well, it's not like Exxon can put in a bit of one dollar and collect when the Chinese firm's bid comes in over the actual retail price." And a light went off! The gameshow "The Price is Right" is structured around an auction. It's a common value, first price auction where the winner's curse is seriously punished but bidding the correct value is significantly rewarded. Contestants bid in order, so the first bidder must bid according to their signal, but follow up bidders have the option of bidding based on their signal, outbidding another contestant by a dollar (effectively stealing their information and neutralizing their bid), and the last contestant has the option of bidding very low, $1, in a bet that everyone else was too high.

Neutralizing a competitor's signal happens in timed EBay auctions (it's called bid sniping) and may well happen in other auctions with similar constraints. I have no idea of the low bid strategy is unique or if there are other systems where it can be applied, or maybe there is some underlying strategy behind it for dealing with risk aversion? Finally, the show offers a tremendous abount of data from natural experiments about peoples' bidding behavior with uncertainty about their signal of the value of a common value item.  I wonder if anyone has done research on it, I don't remember running across any papers when I was doing my literature review for my EBay paper for econometrics.

Maybe my favorite game show as a kid had some influence on why I find auctions so interesting now? Or maybe I just liked it because most of the time I watched it when school was canceled and I had the opportunity to sit in bed and watch TV all morning?