The Shanghai auction raises over a billion dollars in revenue each year, but the rules were recently changed to hold prices and revenues down.
This paper replicates the sharp revenue reductions for the new auction format, but it also documents serious efficiency consequences of the Shanghai auction."The Pursuit of Revenue Reduction: An Experimental Analysis of the Shanghai License Plate Auction"
(with Evan Zuofu Liao), unpublished working paper, 2013.
This paper provides a laboratory test of a new model of bargaining in the shadow of conflict.
Conflict rates are significant and are essentially invariant to power asymmetries.
This invariance is due to the paradox of counterveiling concessions."An Experimental Analysis of Asymmetric Power in Conflict Bargaining"
(with Katri Sieberg, David Clark, Timothy Nordstrom, and William Reed), Games and Economic Behavior, 2013, 4(3): 375-397.
New Survey of the Measurement of Risk Aversion:
"Assessment and Estimation of Risk Preferences" (outline, abstract, and summary)
(with Susan Laury, forthcoming in the Handbook of the Economics of Risk and Uncertainty, M. Machina and K. Viscusi, eds., 2013.
Experimental data largely confirm a paradoxical tendency for defender profiling to take the opposite shape of the profile of "types" selected by the attacker. "'The Paradox of Misaligned Profiling: Theory and Experimental Evidence"
(with Andrew Kydd, Laura Razzolini, aand Roman Sheremeta), unpublished working paper, 2013.
Hierarchical Package Bidding (HPB) for Spectrum Auctions: Laboratory experiments indicate that both efficiency and revenue can be
enhanced by the use of a hierarchical structure of non-overlapping packages and a
pricing rule that signals to bidders how high they need to go to get into the action in the next round of bidding. "Hierarchical Package Bidding: A Paper & Pencil Combinatorial Auction"
(with Jacob Goeree), Games and Economic Behavior, 2010. HPB is being considered for use in the upcoming FCC auction 96.
This paper shows that the quantal response equilibrium does have empirical content if the modeller
is not free to specify decision-specific error distributions or error distributions that
tend to force the error for one decision to be generally larger than the error for another decision. These
perverse manipulations are ruled out when errors in a probabilistic choice model are i.i.d. For example,
the common assumption of double exponential errors produces a logit quantal response equilibrium with
clear empirical predictions. The paper also presents an alternative (axiomatic) "reduced form" QRE model and uses an example to derive the empirical predictions of such a model. "Regular Quantal Response Equilibrium" (with Jacob Goeree and Tom Palfrey), Experimental Economics, 2006, 347-367.
"Economic
Science: An Experimental Approach for Teaching and Research" This
is based on my Presidential Address to the Southern Economic Association,
Southern
Economic Journal, 2003, 69(4), 755-771.
"Ten
Little Treasures of Game Theory, and Ten Intuitive Contradictions"
(with J. Goeree), which reviews standard categories of games and reports
anomalous results for each, American Economic Review, Decenber 2001,
91, 1402-1422..
A new theory of behavior in games
played only once: "A
Model of Noisy Introspection," (with J. Goeree),
Games and Economic Behavior, 2004, 281-294.
Some dramatic results of high-stakes lottery choice experiments:
"Risk
Aversion and Incentive Effects" (with Susan Laury) American
Economic Review, December 2002, 1644-1655. Also see Risk Aversion and Incentives: New Data without Order Effects
(with Susan Laury), American Economic Review, June 2005, 902-912.