Liquidity management is key in industries with variable cash flows. We study how businesses in the highway construction industry manage cash flow by strategically bidding more on work with an earlier payout--a practice known as front-end loading. We find that small contractors, infrequent...

Auctioneers suspecting bidder collusion often lack the formal evidence needed for legal recourse. A practical alternative is to design auctions that hinder collusion. Since Abreu et al. (1986), economic theory has emphasized imperfect monitoring as a constraint on collusion, but evidence remains...

Fees are omnipresent in markets but, with few exceptions, are omitted in economic models-such as Double Auctions-of these markets. Allowing for general fee structures, we show that their impact on incentives and efficiency in large Double Auctions hinges on whether the fees are homogeneous (as,...

For some kinds of goods, rarity itself is valued. "Fashionable'" goods are demanded in part because they are unique. In this paper, we explore the economics of rare goods using auctions of limited-edition shoes held by an e-commerce platform. We model endogenous entry and bidding in multi-unit...

While there are no significant investment characteristics that inhibit art from being considered as an asset, a major hurdle has long been the lack of a systematic measure of its financial performance. Due to its heterogeneity (each piece is different) and its infrequency of trading (the exact...

This paper contains a new review of the research of the last decade that has been designed to shed light on how the art auction system works, what it indicates about price formation, and how well it performs. We begin with a short description of the mechanics of the auction system and then...

This chapter explores the state of the emerging practice of designing markets by the use of agent-based modeling, with special reference to electricity markets and computerized (on-line) markets, perhaps including real-life electronic agents as well as human traders. The paper first reviews the...

We describe the economics literature on auction markets, with an emphasis on the connection between theory, empirical practice, and public policy, and a discussion of outstanding issues. We describe some basic concepts, to highlight some strengths and weaknesses of the literature, and so...

This chapter discusses structural econometric approaches to auctions. Remarkably, much of what can be learned from auction data can be learned without restrictions beyond those derived from the relevant economic model. This enables us to take a nonparametric perspective in discussing how the...

Mechanism design is a subfield of game theory that aims to design games whose equilibria have desired properties such as achieving high efficiency or high revenue. Algorithmic mechanism design is a subfield that lies on the border of mechanism design and computer science and deals with mechanism...