Fantasy Football Auction Drafts
In Fantasy Football players of the game “draft” real NFL players within their own league in an effort to make a roster that produces the most points. Players of the game (team owners) get points based on how the real players they drafted perform and the stats they produce. One form of drafting is known as the “Auction Draft”. In the Auction draft players are auctioned off one by one to team owners and can go for any price that the owner is willing to pay. The auction is not blind, everyone can see everyone’s bid, and it is a first price ascending bid auction, meaning that owners keep bidding higher and higher bids until only one bidder is left.
In this article different auction draft strategies are discussed and analyzed based on owner’s preferences and different trips and tricks are also discussed which are helpful in navigating an actual draft even though these tips and tricks may not be necessary to consider in Auction theory. Three strategies are discussed which are one, bidding the most for the best players early on and then getting significantly less talented players as a result “Stars and Scrubs” two, waiting to try and win players mainly on the hope that most of the other owners will overbid themselves and you can then get players for much cheaper because no one has much money left “Sit and Wait’, and the third is a hybrid approach involving a mix of the previous two strategies. The article recommends a hybrid approach as the most efficient and optimal way to approach these types of auction drafts because of the uncertainty regarding emotions in these drafts. If you play either to conservatively or to aggressively it can lead to rash decision making resulting in a worse team. The criteria for efficiency of bidding and getting good deals is by using consensus rankings and values of players and determining if owners can get players for significantly lower percentages of their consensus value.
The article discusses these strategies under the context and assumption that these auctions involve real people and take place in the form of a game which changes some of the assumptions made in class which discussed auctions in theory. It relates to class because it discusses first price ascending auctions but is interesting because in this real world application of Auction theory bidding your true value every time , or staying in the auction for each player until your value is reached is not necessarily the best option. This is because in fantasy football auction drafts your valuations of players and consensus valuations of players need to be taken in to account both of which are much more variable than the assigned stable values we worked with in class. Specifically, your valuations of certain players can go up depending on how filled your team is and your positional needs. This would create an inefficiency in spending for you on certain players and therefore you will have a much lesser valued team. Because of these other variables in this type of auction format many more considerations have to be made even though at its most basic level it is simply a first price ascending auction draft.
http://www.4for4.com/fantasy-football/fantasy-football-auction-draft-strategy