We analyze two reasons for export prices to be different across markets - namely, quality differentiation and variable markups - and attempt to parse their relative importance and some of their underlying drivers. To overcome the substantial measurement issues in this task, we consider a...

The death of an artist constitutes a negative shock to his future production; it permanently decreases the artist's float. We use this shock to test predictions of speculative trading models with short-selling constraints. Symmetrically to Hong et al. (2006), where an increase in float decreases...

Since the growth of the art market into a capitalized global art industry, public and academic discourse on art auctions has been dominated by record prices. Despite the financial potential of art auctions as well as the public and academic interest in art, understanding of auction prices is...

This paper addresses the issue of the choice of the optimalinstrument to sell new shares, this choice being price versusquantity discrimination (rationing). Previous results in theliterature (Benveniste and Wilhelm, 1990) show that the issuing firmwould be better off if allowed to use both price...

This paper studies the optimal auction for a seller who is bound to sell a single item to one of two potential buyers organized in a "well-coordinated" cartel. After discussing the way the cartel reacts to any auction mechanism, we show that if the seller has no way to deter collusion, he can...

Zheng has recently proposed a seller-optimal auction for (asymmetric) independentprivate- value environments where inter-bidder resale is possible. Zheng's construction requires novel conditions on the bidders' value distribution profile. We clarify the restrictions implied by these conditions....