Electronic commerce has grown extraordinarily over the years, with online auctions being extremely successful forms of trade. Those auctions come in a variety of different formats, such as the Buy-It-Now auction format on eBay, that allows sellers to post prices at which buyers can purchase a...

This paper analyzes an auction mechanism that excludes overoptimistic bidders inspired by the rules of the procurement auctions adopted by several Japanese local governments. Our theoretical and experimental results suggest that the endogenous exclusion rule reduces the probability of suffering...

This paper shows that in online car auctions, resellers are better at appraising the value of the cars they are bidding on than are consumers. Using a unique data set of online car auctions, I show that differences in bidding behavior between resellers and consumers can be explained by...

Pre-College human capital investment occurs within a competitive environment and depends on market incentives created by Affirmative Action (AA) in college admissions. These policies affect mechanisms for rank-order allocation of college seats, and alter the relative competition between blacks...

An auction is externality-robust if unilateral deviations from equilibrium leave the other bidders' payoffs unaffected. The equilibrium and its outcome will then persist if certain types of externalities arise between bidders. One example are externalities due to spiteful preferences, which have...

In this paper we introduce a new type of experiment that combines the advantages of lab and field experiments. The experiment is conducted in the lab but using an unchanged market environment from the real world. Moreover, a subset of the standard subject pool is used, containing those subjects...

This paper analyzes the trade of an indivisible good within a two-stage mechanism, where a seller first negotiates with one potential buyer about the price of the good. If the negotiation fails to produce a sale, a second 'price sealed' bid auction with an additional buyer is conducted. The...

An auction is externality-robust if unilateral deviations from equilibrium leave the other bidders' payoffs unaffected. The equilibrium and its outcome will then persist if certain types of externalities arise between bidders. One example are externalities due to spiteful preferences, which have...

With a laboratory experiment, we study the impact of buy-options and the corresponding buy-price on revenues and bidding behavior in (online) proxy-auctions with independent private valuations. We show that temporary buy-options may reduce revenues for two reasons: At low buy-prices, the...

This paper studies the impact of the presence of human subjects in the role of a seller on bidding in experimental second-price auctions. Overbidding is a robust finding in second- price auctions, and spite among bidders has been advanced as an explanation. If spite extends to the seller, then...