Contest or auction designers who want to maximize the overall revenue are frequently concerned with a trade-off between contest homogeneity and inclusion of bidders with high valuations. In our experimental study, we find that it is not profitable to exclude the most able bidder in favor of...

Recent research suggests that auction winners sometimes fall prey to a "bidder's curse", paying more for an item at auction than they would have paid at a posted price. One explanation for this phenomenon is that bidders are inattentive to posted prices. We develop a model in which bidders'...

Contest designers or managers who want to maximize the overall revenue of a contest (relative performance scheme) are frequently concerned with a trade-off between contest homogeneity and inclusion of contestants with high valuations. In our experimental study, we find that it is not profitable...

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...

This paper experimentally investigates the effect of limits on campaign spending and outcome in an electoral contest where two candidates, an incumbent and a challenger, compete for office in terms of the amount of campaign expenditure. The candidates are asymmetric only in that the incumbent...