Is the Experimental Auction a Dynamic Market?

Experimental auctions are generally thought of as static markets. This paper presents the results of an experimental auction designed to test whether participants’ perceptions regarding the relative difficulty of delaying or reversing a transaction outside of the experimental market systematically affect their willingness-to-pay bids. The results show that auction participants’ perceptions significantly impact their bids in a manner that is consistent with real option theory. These results suggest that economists must be careful to consider the existence of outside markets when designing experimental auctions.experimental auctions, dynamic markets, real option theory, commitment cost

The Pollution Game: A Classroom Exercise Demonstrating the Relative Effectiveness of Emissions Taxes and Tradable Permits

This classroom exercise illustrates the strengths and weaknesses of various regulatory frameworks aimed at internalizing negative externalities from pollution. Specifically, the exercise divides students into three groups—the government regulatory agency and two polluting firms—and allows them to work through a system of uniform command-and-control regulation, a tradable emissions permit framework, and an emissions tax. Students have the opportunity to observe how flexible, market-oriented regulatory frameworks can outperform inflexible command-and-control. More importantly given the ongoing debate about how best to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, students can also observe how the introduction of abatement-cost uncertainty can cause one market-oriented solution to outperform another.classroom experiments, emissions taxes, pollution, tradable emissions permits

The Reverse Auction: A New Approach to Experimental Auction Valuation

I propose an alternative approach to auction valuation in which participants indicate the quantity they wish to buy at a series of prices, with the understanding that one will be randomly chosen as the binding price. This technique allows researchers to estimate entire demand curves as well as own-price elasticities.Demand and Price Analysis,

On the perturbative expansion of boundary reflection factors of the supersymmetric sinh-Gordon model

The supersymmetric sinh-Gordon model on a half-line with integrable boundary conditions is considered perturbatively to verify conjectured exact reflection factors to one loop order. Propagators for the boson and fermion fields restricted to a half-line contain several novel features and are developed as prerequisites for the calculations.Comment: 19 pages, 2 figure

Shutdown characteristics of the Mod-O wind turbine with aileron controls

Horizontal-axis wind turbines utilize partial or full variable blade pitch to regulate rotor speed. The weight and costs of these systems indicated a need for alternate methods of rotor control. Aileron control is an alternative which has potential to meet this need. The NASA Lewis Research Center has been experimentally testing aileron control rotors on the Mod-U wind turbine to determine their power regulation and shutdown characteristics. Experimental and analytical shutdown test results are presented for a 38 percent chord aileron-control rotor. These results indicated that the 38 percent chord ailerons provided overspeed protection over the entire Mod-O operational windspeed range, and had a no-load equilibrium tip speed ratio of 1.9. Thus, the 38 percent chord ailerons had much improved aerodynamic braking capability when compared with the first aileron-control rotor having 20 percent chord ailerons

Effect of precipitation on wind turbine performance

The effects of precipitation on wind turbine power output was analyzed. The tests were conducted on the two bladed Mod-0 horizontal axis wind turbine with three different rotor configurations. Experimental data from these tests are presented which clearly indicate that the performance of the Mod-0 wind turbine is affected by rain. Light rainfall degraded performance by as much as 20 percent while heavy rainfall degraded performance by as much as 30 percent. Snow mixed with drizzle degraded performance by as much as 36 percent at low windspeeds. Also presented are the results of an analysis to predict the effect of rain on wind turbine performance. This analysis used a blade element/momentum code with modified airfoil characteristics to account for the effect of rain and predicted a loss in performance of 31 percent in high winds with moderate rainfall rates. These predicted results agreed well with experimental data

Higher Order and Secondary Hochschild Cohomology

In this note we give a generalization for the higher order Hochschild cohomology and show that the secondary Hochschild cohomology is a particular case of this new construction

Estimating the Value Consumers Derive from Product Labeling

Firms spend billions of dollars annually on new product and label designs in order to attract and retain customers. The issue of labeling is also important to government agencies and nonprofit labeling organizations. For example, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has an organizational body in its Office of Nutritional Products that deals with issues of food and dietary supplement labeling. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service also deals with labeling through its Labeling and Consumer Protection Staff. These government agencies spend millions of dollars trying to ensure that food labels adequately inform consumers. One issue that has not been examined is the welfare difference to consumers from alternative labeling schemes/regulations. It seems likely that different labels would differ in effectiveness at informing consumers.