An important characteristic of any offer is the deadline at which it expires. We consider an ultimatum deadline game in which the proposer's decision variable is the offer deadline, while the responder faces a standard finite-horizon search problem. We show that the responder's strategy is...

The assumption that agents engage in maximizing behavior, while ubiquitous in economic theory, differs from the assumption that agents are willing to rely on the maximizing behavior of others. This paper offers an empirical examination of this distinction using experimental methods. Utilizing a...

The majority of reverse auctions for procurement use a single-attribute (price) format while providing constraints on nonprice attributes such as quality and lead time. Alternatively, a buyer could choose to conduct a multiattribute auction where bidders can specify both a price and levels of...

Some luxury goods manufacturers offer limited editions of their products, whereas some others market multiple product lines. Researchers have found that reference groups shape consumer evaluations of these product categories. Yet little empirical research has examined how reference groups affect...

The format of pricing contracts varies substantially across business contexts, a major variable being whether a contract imposes a fixed fee payment. This paper examines how the use of the fixed fee in pricing contracts affects market outcomes of a manufacturer-retailer channel. Standard...

One of the goals of procurement is to establish a competitive price while affording the buyer some flexibility in selecting the suppliers to deal with. Reverse auctions do not have this flexibility, because it is the auction rules and not the buyer that determines the winner. In practice,...

The decision rules in simulation models of human behavior purport to describe decision-making behavior as it is and not as it should optimally be. Without the criterion of optimality to judge the appropriateness of a decision rule, simulation modelers must rely on empirical confirmation of the...

In this paper we present a new improved design for multiobject auctions and report on the results of experimental tests of that design. We merge the better features of two extant but very different auction processes, the Simultaneous Multiple Round (SMR) design used by the FCC to auction the...

The coordination of supply chains by means of contracting mechanisms has been extensively explored theoretically but not tested empirically. We investigate the performance of three commonly studied supply chain contracting mechanisms: the wholesale price contract, the buyback contract, and the...

An exploratory search for explanations of mismanagement of renewable resources, other than the theory of the commons, was performed by an experiment. Eighty three subjects, mostly recruited from the fisheries sector in Norway, were asked to manage the same simulated virgin fish stock, one...