In an experiment using two-bidder first-price sealed bid auctions with symmetric independent private values, we collected information on the female participants' menstrual cycles. We find that women bid significantly higher than men in their menstrual and premenstrual phase but do not bid...

Conformity behavior, i.e. the agreement between an individual's choices and the prevailing behavior of a reference group, is a commonly observed phenomenon. Though some types of social interactions may give raise to specific incentives to adopt either a majoritarian or a contrarian behavior, we...

We present a hidden Markov model of discrete strategic heterogeneity and learning in first price independent private values auctions. The model includes three latent bidding rules: constant absolute mark-up, constant percentage mark-up, and strategic best response. Rule switching probabilities...

We examine the relative performances of reverse auctions and request for quotes in a simple commodity environment. Enterprises embarking on a reverse auction initiative often start with their commodity purchases. We conduct laboratory experiments and find that this is a poor starting point. Both...

Running conventional laboratory experiments (i.e., with a standard student subject pool) is common practice in economic experiments especially when methodological issues are explored. However, generalization of the results from such experiments to the entire population is subject to severe...

We propose a quantile-based nonparametric approach to inference on the probability density function (PDF) of the private values in first-price sealed-bid auctions with independent private values. Our method of inference is based on a fully nonparametric kernel-based estimator of the quantiles...

Despite the popularity of auction theoretical thinking, it appears that no one has presented an elementary equilibrium analysis of the complete information first-price sealed-bid auction mechanism when the bidding space has a finite grid. This paper aims to remedy that omission. We show that...