In this paper, the authors survey some recent empirical work concerning auctions, first outlining two complementary approaches to the empirical analysis of auctions and then discussing several recent developments in the econometric analysis of field data concerning auctions.

Governments often sell the right to harvest timber on public land. If timber is of heterogeneous quality and timber pri ces reflect this heterogeneity, then charging a fixed stumpage rate per cubic meter of timber harvested independent of timber quality can induce the economically inefficient...