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...

In this paper we analyze the Ancona wholesale fish market (MERITAN) where transactions take place in three simultaneous Dutch auctions. Our objective is to characterize the behavior of market participants and, in particular, that of buyers in such a market structure. Our analysis shows that...

A group of actors, individuals or firms, can engage in collectively providing projects which may be costly or generating revenues and which may benefit some and harm others. Based on requirements of procedural fairness, we derive a bidding mechanism determining endogenously who participates in...

This paper investigates the hypothesis that the objective function of economic agents is non-separable in economic incentives and social preferences. We study fixed-prize contests in a 2×2 experimental design, varying orthogonally the degree of competition of the incentive mechanism (all-pay...

We study in the laboratory a series of first price sealed bid auctions of a common value good. Bidders face three types of information: private information, public information and common uncertainty. Auctions are characterized by the relative size of these three information elements. Only half...

Many auctions are followed by a resale market which occurs when the winner of the auction resells the item won to one of the participants from the original auction. The existence of such transactions may initially appear counter intuitive. However, this paper will show that active inter-bidder...

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...

We use a unique dataset to examine the revenue differences between auctions with a hard-close ending rule versus those with a soft-close ending rule. We find that selling items using the soft-close rule increases the selling price by an amount between $25 and $44 (or 13–20 percent) over the...

This paper presents an experimental comparison of single and multiple-prize all-pay auctions as fundraising mechanisms to finance public goods. We consider a setting characterized by heterogenous incomes and incomplete information, where single and multiple-prize incentive mechanisms are...

In this paper, we perform an empirical investigation to detect if and how agents’ behavior changes with the amount of available information they have. To this aim, we use data from two wholesale fish markets of different thicknesses. We tackle the issue by investigating features such as the...