Federal onshore oil and gas lease bonus bids, 1972-1977: Statistical studies

We studied the statistical behavior of Federal onshore oil and gas lease bonus bids. Like offshore bids, these bids exhibited (a) occasional occurrences of low, noise bids, (b) apparent lognormality, (c) standard deviations (using natural logarithms) close to one, (d) apparent disparities between money left on the table given random lognormal bids consistent with flinching, and (e) wide ranges of aggressive and conservative biases of bidders in individual sales. In fact, the only substantive difference found was a far lesser proportion of joint bidding and larger company bidders bidding for these onshore leases which tended to receive lower bids than offshore bids.