Whether rationality of economic behavior increases with expected payoffs and decreases with the cognitive cost it takes to formulate an optimal strategy remains an open question. We explore these issues with field data, using individual bids from sealed-bid auctions in which we sold nearly...

This paper, prepared for the Journal of Economic Perspectives, provides an overview of the economic issues arising in business-to-business (B2B) online commerce. Just as the industrial revolution mechanized firms' manufacturing functions, the information revolution is now mechanizing firms'...

This paper presents an exploratory analysis of the determinants of prices in online auctions for collectible one-cent coins at the eBay Web site. Our initial data set consists of over 20,000 auctions which took place during July and August 1999, and was collected automaticaaly by a "spider"...

We test two recent theories on the subject of charitable fundraising in capital campaigns. Andreoni (1998) predicts that publicly announced seed contributions can increase the total amount of charitable giving in a capital campaign. Bagnoli and Lipman (1989) predict that another technique for...

In empirical studies of simultaneous-move games, such as sealed-bid auctions, researchers frequently wish to estimate quantities which depend on interactions between the strategies of different players. Examples include the expected revenues of an auction, or the mean allocative efficiency in a...

Sellers in eBay auctions have the opportunity to choose both a public minimum bid amount and a secret reserve price. We ask, empirically, whether the seller is made better or worse off by setting a secret reserve above a low minimum bid, versus the option of making the reserve public by using it...