Inefficiency of Equilibria in Query Auctions with Continuous Valuations

We show that, when bidders have continuous valuations, any ex post equilibrium in an ex post individually rational query auction can only be ex post efficient when the running timeof the auction is infinite for almost all realizations of valuations of the bidders. We also show that this result applies to the general class of bisection auctions. In contrast we show that, when we allow for inefficient allocations with arbitrarily small probability, there is a query auction (to be more specific, a bisection auction) that attains this level of approximate efficiency in equilibrium, while additionally the running time of the auction in equilibrium is finite for all realizations of valuations.