A large body of research has explored the importance of auction design and information structure for auction outcomes. Much less work has considered the importance of the auction process. For example, in many auctions, auctioneers are present and can impact the process of the auction by varying...

We investigate whether the first digit of an odometer reading is more salient to consumers than subsequent digits. We find that retail transaction prices and volumes of used vehicles drop discontinuously at 10,000-mile odometer thresholds, echoing effects found in the wholesale market by...

Can heuristic information processing affect important product markets? We explore whether the tendency to focus on the left-most digit of a number affects how used car buyers incorporate odometer values in their purchase decisions. Analyzing over 22 million wholesale used-car transactions, we...

Are location-specific factors--such as the education and attitude of the local workforce, supplier networks, institutional infrastructure, and local "culture"--important for understanding persistent heterogeneities among firms? We address this question in the context of the automobile industry....

This study provides new identification and estimation results for ascending (traditional English or online) auctions with unobserved auction-level heterogeneity and an unknown number of bidders. When the seller's reserve price and two order statistics of bids are observed, we derive conditions...

This paper presents a two-step identification argument for a large class of quasilinear utility trading games, imputing agents' values using revealed preference based on their choices from a convex menu of expected outcomes available in equilibrium. This generalizes many existing two-step...

We study reserve prices computed to maximize the expected profit of the seller based on historical observations of incomplete bid data typically available to the auction designer in online auctions for advertising or e-commerce. This direct approach to computing reserve prices circumvents the...

This study empirically quantifies the efficiency of a real-world bargaining game with two-sided incomplete information. Myerson and Satterthwaite (1983) and Williams (1987) derived the theoretical ex-ante efficient frontier for bilateral trade under two-sided uncertainty and demonstrated that it...

We study patterns of behavior in bilateral bargaining situations using a rich, new dataset describing over 88 million listings from eBay's Best Offer platform, with back-and-forth bargaining occurring in over 25 million of these listings. We document patterns of behavior and relate them to...

We present a methodology for estimating the distributional effects of an endogenous treatment that varies at the group level when there are group-level unobservables, a quantile extension of Hausman and Taylor (1981). Because of the presence of group-level unobservables, standard quantile...