In this article, we revisit Zipf's law and test the rank-size rule on US cities for different periods of time and city limits. We show that Zipf 's law holds more closely for urban places in 1900 and recently, in 1990 and 2000, for metropolitan areas. With the evolution of the modern city, the...

We examine bidding in a rare book sequential auction that has features of a natural experiment: lots were arranged in alphabetical order, the reserve set non-strategically and half the bids placed by mail-in bidders. We distinguish between the effects induced by the print order of the catalogue...

This paper explores, through a series of experiments, the effect of shill bidding upon revenues and prices in auctions. We study the practice of shill bidding in a common value framework. Our findings are consistent with the theoretical prediction that, if bidders are aware of the possibility of...

A number of papers in the theoretical auction literature show that the release of information regarding the seller’s valuation of an item can cause bidders to bid more aggressively. This widely accepted result in auction theory remains largely untested in the empirical literature. Recent...

In an effort to accommodate a change in the U.S. Federal Highway Administration's goals towards "race-neutral methods" concerning the involvement of Disadvantaged Business Enterprises in procurement contracting, the Texas Department of Transportation created a Learning, Information, Networking...

We provide a comparison of bidding behavior between multi-round and single-round auctions considering bid lettings for asphalt construction contracts that are known to have primarily private costs. Using a reduced-form difference-in-difference approach as well as the nonparametric estimation...

We provide a comparison of bidding behavior between multi-round and single-round auctions considering bid lettings for asphalt construction contracts that are known to have primarily private costs. Using a reduced-form differenc-in-difference approach as well as the nonparametric estimation...

type="main" <p>The fluctuations in fuel prices over the past decade led a number of government agencies to introduce price adjustment clauses in procurement contracting. Those clauses were primarily designed to reduce contractors’ uncertainty without considering the impact of such initiatives on...</p>