A well-recognized problem in the multitasking literature is that workers might substantially reduce their effort on tasks that produce unobservable outputs as they seek the salient rewards to observable outputs. Since the theory related to multitasking is decades ahead of the empirical evidence,...

Recent discoveries in behavioral economics have led to important new insights concerning what can happen in markets. Such gains in knowledge have come primarily via laboratory experiments--a missing piece of the puzzle in many cases is parallel evidence drawn from naturally occurring field...

In traditional auction theory, the auctioneer is usually treated as a non-entity or someone whose incentives are completely aligned with the seller's. In reality, quite frequently that is not the case. Many auctions are administered by third party auctioneers who do not own the product and get a...

We analyze a dynamic second-price auction with an informed bidder and an uninformed bidder who, upon seeing a posted price, learns whether his valuation is above that price. In the essentially unique equilibrium, an informed bidder bids in the first period if her valuation is below some cutoff...

We conducted a field experiment to test the benefit from late bidding (sniping) in online auction markets. We compared sniping to early bidding (squatting) in auctions for newly-released DVDs on eBay. Sniping led to a statistically significant increase in our average surplus. However, this...

A well-recognized problem in the multitasking literature is that workers might substantially reduce their effort on tasks that produce unobservable outputs as they seek the salient rewards to observable outputs. Since the theory related to multitasking is decades ahead of the empirical evidence,...