According to a recently introduced theory (Spann, Zeithammer and Häubl 2010), a name-your-own-price retailer should benefit from charging prospective buyers a non-refundable bidding fee rather than providing the bidding opportunity free of charge. We use an incentive-compatible experiment to provides the first empirical test of the profitability of bidding fees. Confirming the theory’s qualitat...

A well-known result due to Vickery gives a mechanism for selling a number of goods to interested buyers in a way that achieves the maximum social welfare. In practice, a problem with this mechanism is that it requires the buyers to specify a large number of values. In this paper we study the problem of designing optimal mechanisms subject to constraints on the complexity of the bidding language...

This study investigates experimentally the revelation of verifiable information in settings with and without seller competition. A higher level of competition has a positive and significant effect on the revelation of information. Throughout, sellers often choose to report a selected set of information and buyers on average account for this by bidding less than the reported average. However, bu...

Truthful bidding is a desirable property for continuous double auctions (CDAs). Many incentive mechanisms have been proposed to elicit truthful bids. However, existing truthful CDA mechanisms often overlook the possibility that sellers may choose not to deliver the auctioned items to buyers as promised. In this situation, buyers may become unwilling to bid their true valuations in the future to...

Building on Genicot and Ray (2006) we develop a model on non-cooperative bargaining that combines the two main approaches in the literature of contracting with externalities: the o¤er game (in which the principal makes simultaneous o¤ers to the agents) and the bidding game (in which the agents make simultaneous o¤ers to the principal). Allowing for agent coordination, we show that the outcome o...

For k-double auctions with k 0 (0,1), the effect of a change in the degree of affiliation between buyer and seller values on equilibrium bidding strategies is described. Local changes are shown to depend on how affiliation influences standard inverse hazard rates. While for some equilibria, increased affiliation results in high-value buyers and low-value sellers shading their bids less, for oth...

T interactive nature of the Internet promotes collaborative business models (e.g., auctions) and facilitates information-sharing via social networks. In Internet auctions, an important design option for sellers is the setting of a secret reserve price that has to be met by a buyer’s bid for a successful purchase. Bidders have strong incentives to learn more about the secret reserve price in the...

The stringent requirement of the demand-supply equilibrium for delivering electricity has traditionally been dealt with a supply-side perspective, assuming that the demand is not alterable. With the promises of the Smart Grid, demandside management techniques are increasingly becoming more feasible. A demand-side management technique, called Demand Response, aims at inducing changes in electric...

This paper presents a software bidding agent that inserts fake bids on the seller’s behalf to inflate an auction’s price. This behaviour is referred to as shill bidding. Shill bidding is strictly prohibited by online auctioneers, as it defrauds unsuspecting buyers by forcing them to pay more for the item. The malicious bidding agent was constructed to aid in developing shill detection technique...

A step toward a strategic foundation for rational expectations equilibrium is taken by considering a double auction with n buyers and m sellers with interdependent values and a¢ liated private information. If there are su¢ ciently many buyers and sellers, and their bids are restricted to a su¢ ciently …ne discrete set of prices, then, generically, there is an equilibrium in nondecreasing biddin...