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...

I present experimental evidence on the effects of minimum bids in first-price, sealed-bid auctions. The auction experiments manipulated the minimum bids in a preexisting market on the Internet for collectible trading cards from the game Magic: the Gathering. I examine a number of outcomes,...

William Vickrey's predicted equivalences between first-price sealed-bid and Dutch auctions, and between second-price sealed-bid and English auctions, are tested using field experiments that auctioned off collectible trading cards over the Internet. The results indicate that the Dutch auction...

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...

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...

This paper presents experimental evidence on the effects of minimum bids in first-price, sealed-bid auctions. The auction experiments manipulated the minimum bids in a preexisting market on the Internet for collectible trading cards from the game Magic: the Gathering. They yielded data on a...

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...