Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your personal and scholarly purposes. You are not to copy documents for public or commercial purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence.

No abstract

This study examines bidder preferences between alternative auction institutions. In particular we seek to experimentally characterize the degree to which bidders prefer an ascending auction over a sealed bid auction. We …nd very strong ceteris paribus preferences for the ascending institution with bidders choosing it overwhelmingly often when entry prices for the two auctions are the same. When the entry prices of the two auctions di¤er, many subjects can be shown to be willing to pay far more to enter the ascending auction than is explainable by their risk attitudes when accounting for their expectations about the risk preferences of their opponents.JEL Codes: C91, D44

This paper studies a dynamic trade institution, where an auction is combined with a "Buy-It-Now" option. This option presents a take-it-or-leave-it price offered by the seller to a potential buyer before the auction. If the buyer rejects this buyout price, the object is auctioned off. In equilibrium, sales should take place only in the auction. An experimental test reveals that average buyout prices and profits are well captured by the theoretical prediction. However, a substantial amount of sales takes place before the auction. This is caused by offering (too) low or accepting (too) high buyout prices. We discuss alternative explanations such as risk preferences and (wrong) formation of beliefs that might account for agents' behavior.

We examine learning behaviour in auction and fair division experiments with independent private values under two different price rules, first and second price. Participants play all four games repeatedly and submit complete bid functions rather than single bids. This allows us to study how institutional changes are anticipated and whether learning is influenced by the structural differences between games. We find that learning does not drive bidding towards the benchmark solution. Bid functions are adjusted globally rather than locally. Directional learning theory offers a partial explanation for bid changes. The data support a cognitive approach to learning.