For some kinds of goods, rarity itself is valued. "Fashionable'" goods are demanded in part because they are unique. In this paper, we explore the economics of rare goods using auctions of limited-edition shoes held by an e-commerce platform. We model endogenous entry and bidding in multi-unit...

In Buy-It-Now (BIN, hereafter) auctions, sellers can make a "take-it-or-leave-it" price offer (BIN price) prior to an auction. We analyse experimentally how eBay sellers set BIN prices and whether they benefit from offering them. Using the real eBay environment in the laboratory, we find that...

It is common for auctions to feature reserve prices that are kept secret. In auctions with independent private values, there is no clear theoretical explanation for why the reserve price should be disclosed publicly or kept secret. Therefore, we conducted laboratory experiments to investigate...

We investigate experimentally on eBay how sellers set prices in "Buy-It-Now" (BIN) auctions. We find that the eBay format leads to prices substantially below those expected in second-price auctions. Moreover, our results reveal that the information available on eBay about buyer experience and...

If all potential buyers participate in a first-price auction, then (theoretically) the auction price weakly exceeds the price placed by the seller under a posted-price mechanism. However, it is documented that in the online sellers prefer posted-price mechanism to auction. We aim to explain this...

We analyze how sellers of used construction equipment sort products between online and offline auctions based on the quality and transparency of different machine attributes. Sellers are more likely to offer machines online if quality is high for attributes whose integrity can be measured via...

Building upon the static model of Athey and Ellison (2008), we demonstrate the efficient convergence of dynamic position auctions in the presence of consumer search. The entry of low-quality advertisers does not slow this convergence. Our methods are extensions of those introduced by Cary et al....

On whom do food safety announcements have the least impact? Building on research on cognitive dissonance and confirmatory bias, this study shows that consumers tend to inadequately process (food safety) information, pay limited attention to signals, and make purchase decisions that are biased...

Although the WIC food assistance program purchases over one-half of all US infant formula, I find the program has little impact on the prices paid by non-WIC customers. I estimate infant-formula marginal cost and find that it is low compared to price, implying large price-cost markups. But, the...

Reverse pricing is a market mechanism under which a consumer's bid for a product leads to a sale if the bid exceeds a hidden acceptance threshold the seller has set in advance. The seller faces two key decisions in designing such a mechanism: First, he must decide where in the process to collect...