The empirical literature on Affirmative Action (AA) in college admissions tends to ignore the effects admissions policies have on incentives of students to invest developing pre-college human capital. We explore the incentive effects of AA using a field experiment that creates a microcosm of the...

The combinatorial clock auction is becoming increasingly popular for large-scale spectrum awards and other uses, replacing more traditional ascending or clock auctions. We describe some surprising properties of the auction, including a wide range of ex post equilibria with demand expansion,...

This study quantifies the efficiency of a real-world bargaining game with two-sided incomplete information. Myerson and Satterthwaite (1983) and Williams (1987) derived the theoretical efficient frontier for bilateral trade under two-sided uncertainty, but little is known about how well...

This paper studies the welfare consequence of increasing trading speed in financial markets. We build and solve a dynamic trading model, in which traders receive private information of asset value over time and trade strategically with demand schedules in a sequence of double auctions. A...

This paper proposes an estimation method for a repeated auction game under the presence of capacity contraints. The estimation strategy is computationally simple as it does not require solving for the equilibrium of the game. It uses a two stage approach. In the first stage the distribution of...

We study entry and bidding patterns in sealed bid and open auctions with heterogeneous bidders. Using data from U.S. Forest Service timber auctions, we document a set of systematic effects of auction format: sealed bid auctions attract more small bidders, shift the allocation towards these...

Consumer auctions were very popular in the early days of internet commerce, but today online sellers mostly use posted prices. Data from eBay shows that compositional shifts in the items being sold, or the sellers offering these items, cannot account for this evolution. Instead, the returns to...

Increasingly detailed consumer information makes sophisticated price discrimination possible. At fine levels of aggregation, demand may not obey standard regularity conditions. We propose a new randomized sales mechanism for such environments. Bidders can "buy-it-now" at a posted price, or...

We measure the pass-through of emissions costs to electricity prices and explore its determinants. We perform both reduced-form and structural estimations based on optimal bidding in this market. Using rich micro-level data, we estimate the channels affecting pass-through in a flexible manner,...

We introduce a simple and robust approach to answering two key questions in empirical auction analysis: discriminating between models of entry and quantifying the revenue gains from improving auction design. The approach builds on Bulow and Klemperer (1996), connecting their theoretical results...