We provide evidence that culture is a source of pricing bias. In a sample of 1.9 million auction transactions in 49 countries, paintings by female artists sell at an unconditional discount of 42.1%. The gender discount increases with measures of country-level gender inequality — even in artist...

Public sales art catalogues include low and high pre-sale price estimates by experts. This makes it possible to analyze whether pre-sale estimates are unbiased predictors of realized prices. Unbiasedness is tested using a sample of some 1,600 lots of English silver auctioned by Christie's and...

What constitutes an international art center? To answer this question, I analyze the auction sales of fine art for 10 primary art markets; the results suggest four major findings: First, an expansion in the art market contributes to a more than proportional increase in art auction sales. Second,...

We study innovation contests with asymmetric information and identical contestants, where contestants' efforts and innate abilities generate inventions of varying qualities. The designer offers a reward to the contestant achieving the highest quality and receives the revenue generated by the...

Feedback mechanisms that allow partners to rate each other after a transaction are considered crucial for the success of anonymous internet trading platforms. We document an asymmetry in the feedback behavior on eBay, propose an explanation based on the micro structure of the feedback mechanism...

In second price internet auctions with a fixed end time, such as those on eBay, many bidders snipe , i.e., they submit their bids in the closing minutes or seconds of an auction. Late bids of this sort are much less frequent in auctions that are automatically extended if a bid is submitted very...

This paper studies uniform-price auctions for multiple units of airport slots in which the airlines purchase slots for take-off and landing at an airport. It considers strategic behavior on the part of bidding airlines and on the part of airport authority, who acts as a seller and decides supply...

In second price internet auctions with a fixed end time, such as those on eBay, many bidders "snipe", i.e., they submit their bids in the closing minutes or seconds of an auction. Late bids of this sort are much less frequent in auctions that are automatically extended if a bid is submitted very...

A number of countries used discriminatory government procurement policies as part of stimulus packages designed to alleviate the effects of the global economic crisis. This paper collates and updates the evidence related to the size of procurement markets, the level of home bias they exhibit,...