Amazon’s Second Headquarters
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/07/technology/amazon-headquarters-north-america.html
Recently this past September, Amazon announced that it wanted to build a second headquarters somewhere outside of Seattle. As a result, a huge bidding war began with multiple locations vocalizing their interest. The interest in landing this deal with Amazon rose with its payoff of multiple benefits: thousands of high-paying jobs, tax breaks, tourism, etc. Seattle has become one of the United States major technological hotspots due to Bill Gates putting the Microsoft Headquarters in Redmond, Washington. However as of now, Amazon owns 19% of Seattle’s prime office real estate in the city. All may seem well and beneficial, but many underlying problems have been developing due to Seattle’s exponential growth. Everything started becoming more expensive and crowded as the population began increasing. Housing prices began to explode as well as traffic from the mere volume of the world’s best technical engineers coming to Seattle.
This relationship between Amazon and its bidders directly correlate to our discussions about bidding in class. Many of the bids we talk about involve multiple bidders and multiple buyers. However, in this real life situation, there is one technically one bidder(Amazon) and multiple buyers(bidders). I realize why this may be confusing because on paper it says Amazon wants to buy the landscape and the locations are bidding, however due to the enormous benefits of having Amazon’s second headquarters, the locations now become the ones that want Amazon’s presence and not Amazon wanting that specific land plot. In addition, Amazon did not disclose what kind of auction it would be holding. Amazon is looking for an amazing deal that balances price and value. As a result, to get the best price possible, Amazon might hold an auction similar to a second-priced auction in order to ensure they receive the best deal possible.