Reciprocity in feedback giving distorts the production and content of reputation information in a market, hampering trust and trade efficiency. Guided by feedback patterns observed on eBay and other platforms, we run laboratory experiments to investigate how reciprocity can be managed by changes...

Electronic reputation or "feedback" mechanisms aim to mitigate the moral hazard problems associated with exchange among strangers by providing the type of information available in more traditional close-knit groups, where members are frequently involved in one another's dealings. In this paper,...

We study a procurement setting in which the buyer seeks a low price but will not allocate the contract to a supplier who has not passed qualification screening. Qualification screening is costly for the buyer, involving product tests, site visits, and interviews. In addition to a qualified...

Most business-to-business (B2B) auctions are used to transact large quantities of homogeneous goods, and therefore use multiunit mechanisms. In the B2B context, bidders often have increasing returns to scale, or synergies. We compare two commonly used auction formats for selling multiple...

We investigate how auctioneers set reserve prices in auctions. A well-established theoretical result, assuming risk neutrality of the seller, is that the optimal reserve price should not depend on the number of participating bidders. In a set of controlled laboratory experiments, we find that...

We introduce a heuristic method for finding good, feasible solutions for multiproduct lot sizing problems with general assembly structures, multiple constrained resources, and nonzero setup costs and setup times. We evaluate the performance of this heuristic by comparing its solutions to optimal...

We use a behavioral laboratory experiment to study how agents with reputation concerns select the difficulty of their tasks. Drawing upon existing theory, we subjected participants in our study to a context in which they had to convince a principal of their capability to reap financial benefits....

One of the goals of procurement is to establish a competitive price while affording the buyer some flexibility in selecting the suppliers to deal with. Reverse auctions do not have this flexibility, because it is the auction rules and not the buyer that determines the winner. In practice,...

The coordination of supply chains by means of contracting mechanisms has been extensively explored theoretically but not tested empirically. We investigate the performance of three commonly studied supply chain contracting mechanisms: the wholesale price contract, the buyback contract, and the...

We investigate the effect of regret-related feedback information on bidding behavior in sealed-bid first-price auctions. Two types of regret are possible in this auction format. A winner of the auction may regret paying too much relative to the second highest bid, and a loser may regret missing...