Mechanism Choice and Strategic Bidding in Divisible Good Auctions: An Empirical Analysis of the Turkish Treasury Auction Market

We propose an estimation method to bound bidders’ marginal valuations in discriminatory auctions using individual bid-level data and apply the method to data from the Turkish Treasury auction market. Using estimated bounds on marginal values, we compute an upper bound on the inefficiency of realized allocations as well as bounds on how much additional revenue could have been realized in a counterfactual uniform price or Vickrey auction. We conclude that switching from a discriminatory auction to a uniform price or Vickrey auction would not significantly increase revenue. Moreover, such a switch would increase bidder expected surplus by at most 0.02 percent.

THE DYNAMICS OF SELLER REPUTATION: EVIDENCE FROM EBAY -super-*

We construct a panel of eBay seller histories and examine the importance of eBay's reputation mechanism. We find that, when a seller first receives negative feedback, his weekly sales rate drops from a positive 5% to a negative 8%; subsequent negative feedback ratings arrive 25% more rapidly than the first one and don't have nearly as much impact as the first one. We also find that a seller is more likely to exit the lower his reputation is; and that, just before exiting, sellers receive more negative feedback than their lifetime average. Copyright 2010 The Authors. Journal compilation 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. and the Editorial Board of The Journal of Industrial Economics.

On the Empirical Content of Quantal Response Equilibrium

The quantal response equilibrium (QRE) notion of Richard D. McKelvey and Thomas R. Palfrey (1995) has recently attracted considerable attention, due in part to its widely documented ability to rationalize observed behavior in games played by experimental subjects. However, even with strong a priori restrictions on unobservables, QRE imposes no falsifiable restrictions: it can rationalize any distribution of behavior in any normal form game. After demonstrating this, we discuss several approaches to testing QRE under additional maintained assumptions. (JEL C72, D84)