Competition in online land lease auctions in Ukraine: Reduced-form estimation

An innovative pilot project to facilitate the transparent transfer of rental rights for publicly owned agricultural land via an ascending-price online auction was launched in Ukraine in October 2018. This paper analyses publicly disclosed auction data and investigates how competition, auction design characteristics, and farmlandspecific properties influenced the auction outcomes. This information is factored into the probability of the plot being rented (i.e. auction success) and the size of the winning bid (i.e. rental rates). The analysis was conducted using an independent private values framework, employing a mixed-effects model with sample selection. Estimation results confirmed that a higher number of bidders and more active bidding lead to a significantly greater probability of auction success and higher rental rates.