An auction is externality-robust if unilateral deviations from equilibrium leave the other bidders' payoffs unaffected. The equilibrium and its outcome will then persist if certain types of externalities arise between bidders. One example are externalities due to spiteful preferences, which have...

We report results from experimental first-price, sealed-bid, all-pay auctions for a good with a common and known value. We observe bidding strategies in groups of two and three bidders and under two extreme information conditions. As predicted by the Nash equilibrium, subjects use mixed...

There has been a dramatic increase in the use of experimental methods in the past two decades. An oft-cited reason for this rise in popularity is that experimental methods provide the necessary control to estimate treatment effects in isolation of other confounding factors. We examine the...

We study a procedure for selling multiple heterogenous goods, which is commonly used in practice but rarely studied in the literature. The novel feature of this procedure is that instead of selling the goods themselves, the seller offers buyers the right to choose among the available goods....

Multi-unit ascending auctions allow for equilibria in which bidders strategically reduce their demand and split the market at low prices. At the same time, they allow for pre-emptive bidding by incumbent bidders in a coordinated attempt to exclude entrants from the market. We consider an...

This study examines bidder preferences between alternative auction institutions. We seek to characterize experimentally the degree to which bidders prefer an ascending auction to a sealed bid auction. We find very strong ceteris paribus preferences for the ascending institution with bidders...

We provide a novel experimental auction design, in which (i) an exogenous decrease in the probability of winning, conditional on the bid, reduces the optimal bid of a loss averse agent whose reference point is expectations based; (ii) observed bid distributions uniquely identify the participants'...

Although rational choice theory presumes people have a point estimate of their willingness to pay (WTP) for a good or service, the idea of coherent arbitrariness suggests they have an interval of values. Herein we explore bidding behavior in a second-price auction in which bidders have point or...

We study, theoretically and experimentally, sealed-bid first-price auctions with and without package bidding. In the model, a global bidder bids for multiple items and can benefit from synergies, while local bidders bid for a single item. In the equilibrium, package bidding improves (hurts)...

We investigate both theoretically and experimentally the role that information disclosure has on behavior in all pay environments in which all agents must exert costly effort, but only the winner is rewarded. Through the lens of all pay auctions, we show that bidders who have regret concerns...