This paper documents evidence of widespread collusion among construction firms using a novel dataset covering most of the construction projects procured by the Japanese national government from 2003 to 2006. By examining rebids that occur for auctions when all (initial) bids fail to meet the...

A new style of durable goods consumption through a large scale online redistribution marketplace (e.g. eBay and Yahoo! Auction), characterized by a relatively small degree of usage and a short-term ownership, is becoming increasingly popular these days. Yet, the market and welfare structures of...

A new style of durable goods consumption through a large scale online redistribution marketplace (e.g. eBay and Yahoo! Auction), characterized by a relatively small degree of usage and a short-term ownership, is becoming increasingly popular these days. Yet, the market and welfare structures of...

How large are two-sided transaction costs in online platform trades, and who are the major beneficiaries of friction cost reductions? Using a dataset of a multi-use train ticket resale market, we analyze the welfare structure with buyer-seller matching frictions on an online platform. Our model...

We document a novel bidding pattern observed in procurement auctions from Japan: winning bids tend to be isolated. There is a missing mass of close losing bids. This pattern is suspicious in the following sense: it is inconsistent with competitive behavior under arbitrary information structures....