The paper analyzes the socio-economic impacts of dropshipping - a new form of organization of sales, is rapidly gaining the Russian market. Dropshipping opens up tremendous prospects not only for ordinary people, but also for the Russian manufacturers, which if used properly can dropshipping...

Web sites invest significant resources in trying to influence their visibility in online search results. We study the economic incentives of Web sites to invest in this process known as search engine optimization. We focus on methods that improve sites' ranking among the search results without...

In an experiment using two-bidder first-price sealed bid auctions with symmetric independent private values, we collected information on the female participants' menstrual cycles. We find that women bid significantly higher than men in their menstrual and premenstrual phase but do not bid...

In an experiment using two-bidder first-price sealed bid auctions with symmetric independent private values, we scan also the right hand of each subject. We study how the ratio of the length of the index and ring fingers (2D:4D) of the right hand, a measure of prenatal hormone exposure, is...

In this paper we study a multi-stage elimination contest with non-sunk bids: differently from existing literature, we realize that when players are budget-constrained, they do not regard past bids as strategically irrelevant in their decision of how much to bid in following stages. This happens...

As a selling mechanism, auctions have acquired a central position in the free market economy all over the globe. This development has deepened, broadened, and expanded the theory of auctions in new directions. This chapter is intended as a selective update of some of the developments and...

In the ascending-price auctions with Yahoo!-type buy-it-now (BIN), we characterize and derive the closed-form solution for the optimal bidding strategy of the bidder and the optimal BIN price of the seller when they are both risk-averse. The seller is shown to be strictly better o with the BIN...

I present a two-player nested contest which is a convex combination of two widely studied contests: the Tullock (lottery) contest and the all-pay auction. A Nash equilibrium exists for all parameters of the nested contest. If and only if the contest is sufficiently asymmetric, then there is an...

This paper reports on the design of a novel two-stage mechanism, based on strictly proper scoring rules, that allows a centre to acquire a costly forecast of a future event (such as a meteorological phenomenon) or a probabilistic estimate of a specific parameter (such as the quality of an...

We investigate a private value auction in which a single "entrant" on winning imposes a negative externality on two "regular" bidders. In an English auction, when all bidders are active "regulars" free ride, exiting before price reaches their value. In a first-price sealed-bid auction incentives...