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...

We introduce a simple and robust approach to answering two key questions in empirical auction analysis: discriminating between models of entry and quantifying the revenue gains from improving auction design. The approach builds on Bulow and Klemperer (1996), connecting their theoretical results...

We study the effects of occupational licensing on consumer choices and market outcomes in a large online platform for residential home services. We exploit exogenous variation in the time at which licenses are displayed on the platform to identify the causal effects of licensing information on...

We analyze data on tens of thousands of alternating-offer, business-to-business negotiations in the wholesale used-car market, with each negotiation mediated (over the phone) by a third-party company. The data shows the identity of the employee mediating the negotiations. We find that who...

This study provides a structural analysis of detailed, alternating-offer bargaining data from eBay, deriving bounds on buyers and sellers private value distributions using a range of assumptions on behavior. These assumptions range from very weak (assuming only that acceptance and rejection...

This paper uses detailed data on sequential offers from seven vastly different real-world bargaining settings to document a robust pattern: agents favor offers that split the difference between the two most recent offers on the table. Our settings include negotiations for used cars, insurance...

Concerned about the low academic ability of public school teachers, in the 1990s and 2000s, some states increased licensing stringency to weed out low-quality candidates, while others decreased restrictions to attract high-quality candidates. We offer a theoretical model justifying both...

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...

We report a large-scale randomized controlled trial designed to assess whether the partisan cue of a provaccine message from Donald Trump would induce Americans to get COVID-19 vaccines. Our study involved presenting a 27-second advertisement to millions of U.S. YouTube users in October 2021....

We present an equilibrium search model that parsimoniously rationalizes the use of auctions as a sales mechanism for new-in-box goods--a frequent occurrence in online retail markets--and analyze whether the existence of these auctions is welfare enhancing relative to a market consisting only of...