This paper presents the results of an experiment performed to test the properties of an innovative bargaining mechanism (called automated negotiation) used to resolve disputes arising from Internet-based transactions. Automated negotiation is an online sealed-bid process in which an automated...

This paper considers bidding automata programmed by experienced subjects in sequential first price sealed bid auction experiments. These automata play against each other in computer tournaments. The risk neutral subgame perfect Nash equilibrium strategy of the independent private value model...

This article reports the results of a market experiment designed to test the predictions of the constant relative risk aversion model and to study the importance of information feedback in repeated first-price sealed-bid auctions. The data reveal that introduction of price information feedback...

It is well-known in evolutionary game theory that population clustering in Prisoner Dilemma games allows some cooperative strategies to invade populations of stable defecting strategies. We adapt this idea of population clustering to a two-person trust game. Players are typed based on their...

Recently, it has been argued that the evidence in social science research suggests that deceiving subjects in an experiment does not lead to a significant loss of experimental control. Based on this assessment, experimental economists were counseled to lift their de facto prohibition against...

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...

This paper explores the sale of an object to an ambiguity averse buyer. We show that the seller can increase his profit by using an ambiguous mechanism. That is, the seller can benefit from hiding certain features of the mechanism that he has committed to from the agent. We then characterize the...

We propose a sequential auction mechanism for a single object in which the seller jointly determines the allocation and the disclosure policy. A sequential disclosure rule is shown to implement an ascending price auction in which each losing bidder learns his true valuation, but the winning...

Consider agents who undertake costly effort to produce stochastic outputs observable by a principal. The principal can award a prize deterministically to the agent with the highest output, or to all of them with probabilities that are proportional to their outputs. We show that, if there is...

A seller wishes to sell an object to one of multiple bidders. The valuations of the bidders are privately known. We consider the joint design problem in which the seller can decide the accuracy by which bidders learn their valuation and to whom to sell at what price. We establish that optimal...