Along the standard measures of price dispersion, this paper proposes a new method, the residual variance model, to examine the levels of price and price variation within and across 10 kinds of physically identical products on eBay UK. The results find that the price levels and price dispersions...

Buyer-seller networks where price is determined by an ascending-bid auction are important in many economic examples such as certain real estate markets, radio spectrum sharing, and buyer-supplier networks. However, it may be that some sellers are better off not participating in the auction. We...

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...

Behavioral robustness is essential in mechanism design. Existing papers focus on robustness as captured by dominant strategies. This paper studies the novel concept of externality-robustness, which addresses players' motives to affect other players' monetary payoffs. One example is externalities...

This paper examines the effect that endangered species regulation has on natural resource development. Specifically, we use data from competitive auctions to estimate the effect that land-use regulation protecting endangered caribou in the Canadian province of Alberta has on the price producers...

We consider a budget-constrained mechanism designer who selects an optimal set of projects to maximize her utility. A project's cost is private information and its value for the designer may vary. In this allocation problem, the selection of projects - both which and how many - is endogenously...

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...

In spring 2000, the British government auctioned off licences for Third Generation mobile telecommunications services. In the preparation of the auction, two designs involving each a hybrid of an English and a sealed-bid auction were suggested by the government: a discriminatory and a uniform...

The theoretical literature on collusion in auctions suggests that the first-price mechanism can deter the formation of bidding rings. In equilibrium, collusive negotiations are either successful or are avoided altogether, hence such analysis neglects the effects of failed collusion attempts. In...