Following the Internet’s widespread adoption, much economic work has studied ‘online platforms’: firms that mainly interact with consumers in cyberspace. This article surveys such work, focusing on the ways in which traditional economic models have been adapted to incorporate...

Auction houses use both in-house and third-party guarantees for sellers who are concerned about the risk that not enough bidders will enter the auction for their works. Auction houses are compensated for guarantees by buyers’ commissions and successful sales after attracting important...

"In many countries, employment services are contracted out to private providers. However, there is little evidence on the contract design as well as on the effects of differential pricing on private provider performance. This paper contributes to the literature by presenting detailed information...

Many bidders enter the Government of Canada securities auctions with short or long pre-auction inventory. We find that bidding strategies and auction performance vary with pre-auction ownership structure. Short and long bidders bid higher average prices and demand larger quantities than do...

From a theory viewpoint, the use of auctions with zero public reserve prices also called absolute auctions, or the use of auctions with secret reserve prices is somehow puzzling despite being common. By allowing that buyers differ in their processing of past data regarding how the participation...

We study all-pay auctions with multiple prizes. The players have the same value for all the certain prizes except for one uncertain prize for which each player has a private value. We characterize the equilibrium strategy and show that if the number of prizes is smaller than the number of...

This paper analyzes two-stage rank-order tournaments. A principal decides (i) how to spread prize money across the two periods, (ii) how to weigh performance in the two periods when awarding the second period prize, and (iii) whether to reveal performance after the first period. The information...

We find evidence for the behavioral biases of anchoring and loss aversion. We find that anchoring is more important for items that are resold quickly, and we find that the effect of loss aversion increases with the time that a painting is held. The evidence in favor of anchoring and loss...

We study multi-stage sequential all-pay contests (auctions) where heterogeneous contestants are privately informed about a parameter (ability) that affects their cost of effort. We characterize the sub-game perfect equilibrium of these multi-stage sequential all-pay contests and analyze the...