residual wage disparity and coordination unemployment how much of residual wage dispersion can be explained by an absence of coordination among firms to answer we construct a dynamic directed search model with identical workers where firms can create high or low productivity jobs and are uncoordinated in their offers to workers calibrated to the u s economy workers can exploit ex post opportunities once approached by firms and can conduct on the job search the stationary equilibrium wage distribution is hump shaped skewed significantly to the right and with baseline parameters generates residual dispersion statistics 75 90 of those found empirically however the model underestimates the average duration of unemployment

efficient mechanisms for bilateral trading we consider bargaining problems between one buyer and one seller for a single object the seller s valuation and the buyer s valuation for the object are assumed to be independent random variables and each individual s valuation is unknown to the other we characterize the set of allocation mechanisms that are bayesian incentive compatible and individually rational and show the general impossibility of ex post efficient mechanisms without outside subsidies for a wide class of problems we show how to compute mechanisms that maximize expected total gains from trade and mechanisms that can maximize a broker s expected profit journal of economic literature classification number 026

the probability of sale and price premiums in withdrawn auctioned properties this paper examines the impact of the auction process of residential properties that whilst unsuccessful at auction sold subsequently the empirical analysis considers both the probability of sale and the premium of the subsequent sale price over the guide price reserve and opening bid the findings highlight that the final achieved sale price is influenced by key price variables revealed both prior to and during the auction itself factors such as auction participation the number of individual bidders and the number of bids are significant in a number of the alternative specifications

temporary boycotts as self fulfilling disruptions of markets abstract this paper demonstrates how equilibrium involving anticipated boycotts and actual boycotts can occur even though consumers are negligible and only care about the price they pay and the timing of purchase the model is a two period durable goods monopoly game with demand uncertainty first a non boycott equilibrium is characterized under regularity assumptions ruling out multiplicative uncertainty there are additional equilibria in which the firm sets a low price in period 0 based on the anticipation that consumers will boycott whenever the price exceeds a threshold also the augmented game with a publicly observed sunspot has equilibria in which boycotts occur on the equilibrium path with positive probability

on the choice of pricing policies ex ante commitment and prisoners dilemma abstract i study the endogenous formation of pricing policies posted uniform versus negotiated pricing by using a version of a two stage pricing game in a duopoly context the model explains the prevalence of uniform pricing in some markets countries and identifies a typical prisoners dilemma in these cases the sellers commitment to a pre announced price under uniform pricing mitigates the fear of buyers that they might be exploited once they start price negotiations while such buyers anticipation induces sellers to adopt uniform pricing in an attempt to capture more buyers it results in intensified competition with lower seller payoffs

equivalence of auctions and posted prices abstract we determine the equilibrium in two transaction mechanisms auctions and posted prices agents choose whether to participate in markets where trades are consummated by auctions or in markets where sellers post prices we show that the selling mechanisms are practically equivalent previous studies have shown that auction markets emerge as a unique evolutionary stable equilibrium when compared to bargaining markets posted price markets dominate bargaining markets similarly journal of economic literature classification numbers c78 c73 d44

equilibrium in auctions with entry the authors model entry incentives in auctions with risk neutral bidders and characterize a symmetric equilibrium in which the number of entrants is stochastic the presence of too many potential bidders raises coordination costs that detract from welfare the authors show that the seller and society can benefit from policies that reduce market thickness i e the relative abundance of buyers their analysis extends well known revenue equivalence and ranking theorems but also demonstrates that variations in the auction environment affect optimal policies e g reservation prices in ways not anticipated by models that ignore entry copyright 1994 by american economic association

revenue management with forward looking buyers a seller wishes to sell multiple goods by a deadline for example the end of a season potential buyers enter over time and can strategically time their purchases each period the profit maximizing mechanism awards units to the buyers with the highest valuations exceeding a sequence of cutoffs we show that these cutoffs are deterministic depending only on the inventory and time remaining in the continuous time limit the optimal mechanism can be implemented by posting anonymous prices when incoming demand decreases over time the optimal cutoffs satisfy a one period look ahead property and prices are defined by an intuitive differential equation

investment incentives in procurement auctions this paper investigates firms incentives to invest in cost reduction in the first price sealed bid auction a format largely used for procurement two central features of the model are that we allow firms to be heterogeneous and that investment is observable we find that firms will tend to underinvest in cost reduction because they anticipate fiercer head on competition using the second price auction as a benchmark we also find that the first price auction will elicit less investment from market participants and that this is socially inefficient these results have implications for market design when investment is important different market institutions provide different incentives for firms to reduce costs acquire information expand and so on in short to undertake any activity that affects their competitive positions accordingly the performance of these market institutions should be judged not only from a static perspective taking firms competitive positions as given but also from a dynamic perspective auction markets are a natural competitive environment to study because there is a clear sense in which we can design such markets by choosing appropriate rules for competition in this paper we study how the first price auction fpa a format commonly used for procurement affects firms incentives to invest in cost reduction many procurement markets are characterized by a small number of participants heterogeneity among firms and low rates of turnover therefore it is interesting to investigate to what extent the format used for the auction contributes to these characteristics the basic ingredients of our model are as follows there are n firms and one of them has the opportunity prior to the auction to make an investment we model this investment as an improvement in the ex ante distribution of costs for this firm the main question we ask is what are the firm s incentives to invest given that this investment is observed by its competitors clearly the benefits of such investment depend on how the firm s competitors react in other words to determine the firm s incentive to invest we need to compare the equilibrium at the procurement stage if it makes this investment and if it does not in section 3 we derive new comparative statics results for the fpa we find that after the investment the investor s opponents will bid collectively more aggressively this result holds generally when there are only two bidders or when the investor s opponents are symmetric proposition 1 otherwise a sufficient condition is that investment changes market leadership proposition 2 in the language of industrial organization investment has a negative strategic effect in the fpa this erodes 1

comparing revenue from auctions and posted prices i analyze the market for compact discs using an original data set of items listed for sale online over 5000 listings of both new and used compact discs were collected from ebay which provides sellers a choice between two mechanisms auction or posted price and its subsidiary half com which features only posted prices despite the often cited revenue dominance property of auctions many sellers choose to post a fixed price to explain this anomaly i examine empirically the determinants of the revenue earned by sellers in this market i find that posted price goods sell for higher prices while auctioned goods sell with a higher probability further results suggest that the size of a seller s inventory is the key factor in the choice between selling in an auction and posting a fixed price in particular sellers with large inventories are more likely to use the posted price mechanism

efficient competition through cheap talk the case of competing auctions we consider a large market where auctioneers with private reservation values compete for bidders by announcing cheap talk messages if auctioneers run efficient first price auctions then there always exists an equilibrium in which each auctioneer truthfully reveals her type the equilibrium is constrained efficient assigning more bidders to auctioneers with larger gains from trade the choice of the trading mechanism is crucial for the result most notably the use of second price auctions equivalently ex post bidding leads to the nonexistence of any informative equilibrium we examine the robustness of our finding in various dimensions including finite markets and equilibrium selection

gains from an integrated market for tradable renewable energy credits abstract decoupling the environmental attributes of renewable energy re generation from the physical unit of energy is an innovative mechanism for marketing green or renewable power the introduction of tradable renewable energy credits trecs allows the green power attributes of energy to be sold or traded separately from the physical unit of energy since the green power certificate system removes potential locational and physical bottlenecks both suppliers and consumers gain flexibility in the marketplace the trec is also an efficient tool to meet renewable portfolio standard rps required by different states in the us this paper discusses the rps requirements for different states and examines the implications of an integrated trec market it offers a competitive setting to the consumers to pay for renewable energy and a cost effective tool to support renewable energy generation grace and wiser 2002 this paper also highlights some practical difficulties that should be addressed in order to establish an efficient integrated trec market

two stage residual inclusion estimation addressing endogeneity in health econometric modeling the paper focuses on two estimation methods that have been widely used to address endogeneity in empirical research in health economics and health services research two stage predictor substitution 2sps and two stage residual inclusion 2sri 2sps is the rote extension to nonlinear models of the popular linear two stage least squares estimator the 2sri estimator is similar except that in the second stage regression the endogenous variables are not replaced by first stage predictors instead first stage residuals are included as additional regressors in a generic parametric framework we show that 2sri is consistent and 2sps is not results from a simulation study and an illustrative example also recommend against 2sps and favor 2sri our findings are important given that there are many prominent examples of the application of inconsistent 2sps in the recent literature this study can be used as a guide by future researchers in health economics who are confronted with endogeneity in their empirical work

managing online auctions current business and research issues the internet s computational power and flexibility have made auctions a widespread and integral part of both consumer and business markets though online auctions are a multi billion dollar annual activity with a growing variety of sophisticated trading mechanisms scientific research on them is at an early stage this paper analyzes the current state of management science research on online auctions it develops a broad research agenda for issues such as the behavior of online auction participants the optimal design of online auctions the integration of auctions into the ongoing operation of firms and the use of the data generated by online auctions to inform future trading mechanisms these research areas will draw from applied and theoretical work spanning management science economics and information systems

redefining recs part 2 untangling certificates and emission markets abstract renewable energy and greenhouse gas emissions markets are currently in a state of confusion regarding the treatment of renewable energy certificate recs how should emission trading schemes treat recs how can emission mitigation policies provide real incentives for renewable generation the objective of rec markets should be to promote additional renewable energy investments the author asserts that defining recs in terms of attributes especially off site attributes does not further this goal ambiguous language such as environmental attribute or environmental benefit creates confusion in the marketplace while failing to address the relevant coordination issues with renewable portfolio standard compliance markets voluntary emission offset markets or emission cap and trade markets specifically defining recs in terms of off site attributes creates a number of problems including that once an emissions cap and trade scheme is in place such definitions of a rec can become indefensible the author proposes to redefine recs in terms of on site attributes which resolves the aforementioned problems and allows compliance and voluntary renewable energy and emission markets to function without conflicts ideally environmental commodities should be homogeneous first best measures of the relevant environmental good as well as easily measured and verified the author proposes tradable environmental commodities that achieve these characteristics

optimal auctions revisited in symmetric privately known values oral auctions with costly entry for bidders the seller can do no better than by committing ex ante to a reservation price and entry fees or subsidies which result in no fewer and at most one more bidders than a reservation price equal to the seller s value would in the absence of entry fees or subsidies journal of economic literature classification numbers d44 c72

school supply constraints and children s educational outcomes in rural ghana abstract studies of school attainment often fail to acknowledge the possibility that prices for all schooling levels affect the decision to attend any one schooling level in developing countries the assumption that schooling costs are constant throughout the education cycle is manifestly untrue this paper concentrates on the empirical implications of introducing schooling costs that increase with schooling level the results suggest that the cost of advanced levels of education influences decisions at the primary school level the relative magnitude of the cross price elasticities suggests that cross price effects should not be ignored when designing educational user fees

the shill bidding effect versus the linkage principle abstract the analysis of second price auctions with externalities is utterly modified if the seller is unable to commit not to participate in the mechanism for the general symmetric model introduced by milgrom and weber p milgrom r weber a theory of auctions and competitive bidding econometrica 50 1982 1089 1122 we characterize the full set of separating equilibria that are symmetric among buyers and with a strategic seller being able to bid in the same way as any buyer through a so called shill bidding activity the revenue ranking between first and second price auctions is different from the one arising in milgrom and weber the benefits from the highlighted linkage principle are counterbalanced by the shill bidding effect

dynamic pricing behavior in perishable goods markets evidence from secondary markets for major league baseball tickets sellers of perishable goods increasingly use dynamic pricing strategies as technology makes it easier to change prices and track inventory this paper tests how accurately theoretical models of dynamic pricing describe sellers behavior in secondary markets for event tickets a classic example of a perishable good it shows that the simplest dynamic pricing models describe very accurately both the pricing problem faced by sellers and how they behave explaining why sellers cut prices dramatically by 40 percent or more as an event approaches the estimates also imply that dynamic pricing is valuable raising the average seller s expected payoff by around 16 percent

how do selling mechanisms affect profits surplus capacity and prices with unknown demand i analyze a model in which a seller wishes to sell multiple homogeneous goods to a large group of buyers with unknown demand the seller may either sell objects via a posted price mechanism a discriminatory price auction a uniform price auction their open bid analogs or a revelation mechanism in which the seller first asks all potential buyers to report their valuations and then sets a reserve price i show that the revelation mechanism leads to the greatest profits the auction mechanisms result in identical expected profits and the posted price mechanism results in the smallest profits however the more profitable mechanisms impose stronger informational requirements that may make these mechanisms infeasible in practice and the posted price mechanism also results in the greatest total surplus i also find the seller chooses a lower capacity and reserve price in an auction than in the posted price mechanism

optimality and robustness of the english auction abstract in milgrom and weber s 1982 econometrica 50 1089 1122 general symmetric model under a few additional regularity conditions the english auction maximizes the seller s expected profit within the class of all posterior implementable trading procedures and fails to do so among all interim incentive compatible procedures in which losers do not pay these results suggest that appropriate notions of robustness and simplicity which imply the optimality of the english auction for a risk neutral seller must impose bargaining like features on the set of feasible trading mechanisms journal of economic literature classification numbers d44 d82

costly signalling in auctions this paper analyses a dynamic auction in which a fraction of each bid is sunk jump bidding is used by bidders to signal their private information bluffing respectively sandbagging occurs when a weak respectively strong player seeks to deceive his opponent into thinking that he is strong respectively weak a player with a moderate valuation bluffs by making a high bid and drops out if his bluff is called a player with a high valuation should vary his bids and should sometimes sandbag by bidding low to induce lower bids by his rival

trading mechanism selection with directed search when buyers are risk averse we endogenize the trading mechanism selection in a model of directed search with risk averse buyers and show that the unique symmetric equilibrium entails all sellers using fixed price trading mechanisms that prescribe the sale price as a function of the realized demand auctions bargaining discount pricing etc expose buyers to the price risk the uncertainty of not knowing how much to pay in advance fixed price trading eliminates the price risk which is why risk averse customers accept paying more to shop at such stores

cost effectiveness as energy policy mechanisms the paradox of technology neutral and technology specific policies in the short and long term when choosing policy mechanisms to design and deploy energy policies policymakers typically seek cost effective ones linking cost effectiveness to the lowest cost of support for res e generation and or consumer costs the objectives of this paper are to analyze the cost effectiveness of renewable portfolio standards rps feed in tariffs fit and auctions in the short and long term considering both technology neutral and technology specific approaches results show that rps and auctions are more cost effective than feed in tariffs fit in the short term if cost effectiveness is defined as minimizing consumer costs also if one or more emerging technologies with higher levelized life cycle costs lcc low cumulative production and high experience elasticity are considered in the pool of res e policy design a technology neutral approach in the short term could lock out these emerging technologies avoiding a long term lcc reduction in this case a technology specific policy used in the short term would reflect lower total generation policy costs in the long term if compared with a technology neutral policy in both short and long term this paper calls this phenomenon the paradox of technology neutral and technology specific policies in the long term considering the results this paper suggests a mix of technology neutral and technology specific policies using rps or auction mechanisms to promote res e

auctions versus posted price selling two popular selling methods posted price selling and auctions are compared here in an independent private values model without auctioning costs auctioning is always optimal when auctioning is costly auctions are still preferable if the marginal revenue curve is sufficiently steep the global steepness of the marginal revenue curve is found to coincide with the dispersion around the mean for a number of standard distributions finally the prices of the monopoly seller and of the social optimum are compared copyright 1993 by american economic association

implications of carbon cap and trade for us voluntary renewable energy markets many consumers today are purchasing renewable energy in large part for the greenhouse gas ghg emissions benefits that they provide emerging carbon regulation in the us has the potential to affect existing markets for renewable energy carbon cap and trade programs are now under development in the northeast under the regional greenhouse gas initiative rggi and in early stages of development in the west and midwest there is increasing discussion about carbon regulation at the national level as well while renewable energy will likely benefit from carbon cap and trade programs because compliance with the cap will increase the costs of fossil fuel generation cap and trade programs can also impact the ability of renewable energy generation to affect overall co2 emissions levels and obtain value for those emissions benefits this paper summarizes key issues for renewable energy markets that are emerging with carbon regulation such as the implications for emissions benefits claims and voluntary market demand and the use of renewable energy certificates recs in multiple markets it also explores policy options under consideration for designing carbon policies to enable carbon markets and renewable energy markets to work together published by elsevier ltd

how auctions work for wine and art interview auctioneers and even to buy a little wine in the meantime i have also had the opportunity with john abowd 1988 to observe and collect data on the auction sale of impressionist and contemporary paintings this paper reports on some of the empirical regularities that i and others have observed in the actual operation of the auction markets for these items in view of the rich and diverse array of theoretical literature on auctions it seems high time economists began to spell out precisely what facts it is meant to explain 2

a structural model of competing sellers auctions and posted prices in an original data set of goods listed for sale online i observe that both auctions and posted prices are popular with buyers and sellers in the compact disc market to explain why these two mechanisms coexist i estimate a structural model of competing sellers who differ in the value of their outside options buyers are allowed to value auctioned and posted price goods differently but the estimated value distributions suggest that differences across buyers do not explain the mechanism coexistence that i observe in contrast differences across sellers outside options are important the value of the outside option segments the market with high outside option sellers choosing to post a fixed price there are two key forces at work that drive this empirical result first competition between sellers favors coexistence over an auction only or a posted price only marketplace because sellers prefer to be in a market with fewer rivals second sellers with more valuable outside options prefer the posted price mechanism because posted price goods sell less often than auctioned goods but at a higher price as a result a larger outside option reduces the loss from not selling and favors the posted price mechanism

the bidder s curse traditional explanations for the popularity of auctions are efficiency and revenue maximization we argue that another reason is the potential for overbidding i e buyers bidding above their willingness to pay outside the auction the auction mechanism ensures that even if only few buyers overbid they affect prices and allocations we employ a novel approach to identify overbidding in the field comparing auction prices to simultaneous fixed prices for identical items on the same ebay webpage we argue that fixed prices provide an upper bound for auction bids in a detailed data set of board game auctions we find that the final price exceeds the simultaneous fixed price in 42 percent of the auctions the result is not explained by differences in item quality shipping costs or seller reputation prior auction experience does not eliminate overbidding the finding replicates in a second broad data set of a cross section of auctions 48 percent overbidding the substantial fraction of overbid auctions is induced by a small number of bidders only 17 percent ever bid above the fixed price using a simple model of second price auctions with alternative fixed prices we show that transaction costs of switching between auctions and fixed prices cannot explain the results given that even the expected auction price is higher than the fixed price consistent with limited attention the closer the fixed price is listed relative to an auction the less likely are overbids this effect is strongest for bidders first bids when they are likely to examine the auction and fixed price listings more closely

dynamic competition with random demand and costless search a theory of price posting this paper studies a dynamic model of perfectly competitive price posting under demand uncertainty firms must produce output in advance after observing aggregate sales in prior periods firms post prices for their unsold output in each period the demand of a new batch of consumers is randomly activated existing customers who have not yet bought and then new customers arrive at the market in random order observe the posted prices and either purchase at the lowest available price or delay their purchase decision we construct a sequential equilibrium in which the output produced and its allocation across consumers is efficient thus consumers endogenously sort themselves efficiently with the highest valuations purchasing first transaction prices in each period rise continuously as firms become more optimistic about demand followed by a market correction by the last period prices are market clearing

the danish green certificate system some simple analytical results we formulate a simple static equilibrium model for the electricity market taking account of both green certificates and co2 emission permits the objective is to investigate the relationship between these markets under the existence of upper and lower price bounds on the green certificates both in the short and in the long run we perform various comparative static changes of the parameters of the model and study how these affect the endogenous variables of the model as well as producers and consumers surplus we also investigate the effects of imports and exports of electricity several comparative static results are derived and in particular it is shown that harsher co2 emission constraints and increased import wholesale price both may lead to reduced capacity of green electricity

why do sellers usually prefer auctions we compare the most common methods for selling a company or other asset when participation is costly a simple simultaneous auction and a sequential process in which potential buyers decide in turn whether to enter the bidding the sequential process is always more efficient but preemptive bids transfer surplus from the seller to buyers because the auction is more conducive to entry precisely because of its inefficiency it usually generates higher expected revenue we also discuss the effects of lock ups matching rights break up fees as in takeover battles entry subsidies etc

auctions with a buy price the case of reference dependent preferences abstract in an auction with a buy price the seller provides bidders with an option to end the auction early by accepting a transaction at a posted price this paper develops a model of an auction with a buy price in which bidders use the auction s reserve price and buy price to formulate a reference price the model both explains why a revenue maximizing seller would want to augment her auction with a buy price and demonstrates that the seller sets a higher reserve price when she can affect the bidders reference price through the auction s reserve price and buy price than when she can affect the bidders reference price through the auction s reserve price only the comparative statics properties of bidding behavior are in sharp contrast to equilibrium behavior in other models where the existence and size of the auction s buy price have no effect on bidding behavior

personalized prices and uncertainty in monopsony abstract we analyze personalized pricing by a monopsonist facing a finite number of ex ante identical capacity constrained suppliers with privately known costs when the distribution of costs is sufficiently smooth and regular the buyer chooses to make the same offer to all suppliers leading to a posted price when demand is sufficiently concave convex this price is lower higher than the classical monopsony price in the limit as the seller capacities tend to zero we obtain the classical monopsony price therefore our model provides a decentralized micro foundation for monopsony

upping the ante how to design efficient auctions with entry of primary importance in auction design is the set of strategies available to the seller at the auction stage we first formalize hold up regarding entry costs that preys on second price auctions when the seller may engage in a costly shill bidding activity we derive the optimal reserve and show how shill bidding can make posted prices outperforming auctions second we advocate for a new regulation where shills would be banned but with the possibility of canceling sales ex post which offers some valuable flexibility the english auction with jump bids implements then the first best in general environments

inferring ascending auction participation from observed bidders abstract participation in internet auctions goes well beyond those who place a bid participants arrive in random order and if the auction s standing price has already exceeded a participant s valuation she will not bid even so her unreported valuation is a relevant part of demand for the item and in an alternate random order her bid would have been registered i provide a method to estimate the average number of participants from the average number of bidders per auction this enables estimation of the distribution of participant valuations from either the distribution of closing prices or the distribution of all observed bids

the effectiveness of english auctions abstract we study the performance of the english auction under different assumptions about the seller s degree of bayesian sophistication we define the effectiveness of an auction as the ratio between the expected revenue it generates for the seller and the expected valuation of the object to the bidder with the highest valuation total surplus we identify tight lower bounds on the effectiveness of the english auction for general private values environments and for private values environments where bidders valuations are non negatively correlated for example when the seller faces 12 bidders who the seller believes have non negatively correlated valuations whose expectations are at least as high as 60 of the maximal possible valuation an english auction with no reserve price generates an expected price that is more than 80 of the value of the object to the bidder with the highest valuation

dual mechanism for an online retailer abstract while posted price and auction have typically been seen as alternatives to each other we observe web stores selling a product at a posted price and simultaneously running auctions for the identical product a phenomenon that has not been studied fully in this article we study a dual mechanism where an online retailer combines the two conventional mechanisms posted price and auction for multiple units of a product we demonstrate that the dual mechanism can be used to achieve market segmentation when customers discount the expected utility of auctions we characterize the customer s decision rule and formulate a retailer s profit function under the dual mechanism finally we compare the performance of three selling mechanisms posted price auction and dual through computational experiments

pricing in the online invoice trading market first empirical evidence abstract in recent years online invoice trading has gained importance in providing smes with short term financing in this paper we present first empirical evidence concerning the question whether the risk of payment difficulties is appropriately reflected in the pricing variables to this end we investigate predictors of default of online invoice trading platforms we analyze both the probability of default and the loss rate and find that the interest rate the duration and the percentage funded have good predictive power furthermore we show that the pricing mechanism auction vs fixed prices helps to explain defaults on online invoice trading platforms

generation capacity expansion in a risky environment a stochastic equilibrium analysis we cast models of the generation capacity expansion type formally developed for the monopoly regime into equilibrium models better adapted for a competitive environment we focus on some of the risks faced today by investors in generation capacity and thus pose the problem as a stochastic equilibrium model we illustrate the approach on the problem of the incentive to invest agents can be risk neutral or risk averse we model risk aversion through the cvar of plants profit the cvar induces risk adjusted probabilities according to which investors value their plants the model is formulated as a complementarity problem including the cvar valuation of investments an illustration is provided on a small problem that captures several features of today s electricity world a choice often restricted to coal and gas units a peaky load curve because of wind penetration uncertain fuel prices and an evolving carbon market we assess the potential of the approach by comparing energy only and capacity market organizations in this risky environment our results can be summarized as follows a deterministic analysis overlooks some changes of capacity structure induced by risk whether in the capacity market or energy only organizations the risk neutral analysis also misses a shift towards less capital intensive technologies that may result from risk aversion last risk aversion also increases the shortage of capacity compared to the risk neutral view in the energy only market when the price cap is low this may have a dramatic impact on the bill to the final consumer the approach relies on mathematical programming techniques and can be extended to full size problems the results are illustrative and may deserve more investigation

market mechanisms in online peer to peer lending online peer to peer lending p2p lending has emerged as an appealing new channel of financing in recent years a fundamental but largely unanswered question in this nascent industry is the choice of market mechanisms i e how the supply and demand of funds are matched and the terms price at which transactions will occur two of the most popular mechanisms are auctions where the crowd determines the price of the transaction through an auction process and posted prices where the platform determines the price while p2p lending platforms typically use one or the other there is little systematic research on the implications of such choices for market participants transaction outcomes and social welfare we address this question both theoretically and empirically we first develop a game theoretic model that yields empirically testable hypotheses taking into account the incentive of the platform we then test these hypotheses by exploiting a regime change from auctions to posted prices on one of the largest p2p lending platforms consistent with our hypotheses we find that under platform mandated posted prices loans are funded with higher probability but the preset interest rates are higher than borrowers starting interest rates and contract interest rates in auctions more important all else equal loans funded under posted prices are more likely to default thereby undermining lenders returns on investment and their surplus although platform mandated posted prices may be faster in originating loans auctions that rely on the crowd to discover prices are not necessarily inferior in terms of overall social welfare this paper was accepted by chris forman information systems

interactions between the power and green certificate markets abstract the current trend of liberalising the power markets is combined with ambitious deployment plans for power production based on renewable energy supplies a new policy scheme to ensure this extension has been developed in the form of a green certificate system with a politically determined target of deployment in such a system producers of renewably based electricity receive tradable certificates in proportion to the electricity they produce the producer can thereby sell these certificates and receive additional revenue apart from the power price this paper studies the price and consumption effects of such a system with a simple model we show that the effects are ambiguous this ambiguity is caused by the interaction between the two markets therefore the green certificate system is difficult to manage if the state has parallel energy targets such as a desired deployment of renewably based energy and a stabilisation or reduction of the energy consumption in addition this complicates the regulation through a deployment target of renewably based power production as the regulator has to be aware of the different effects which follow a specific target until now these effects have not been considered in the analyses of the green certificate system when introducing the system even though it might have considerable consequences for the success of the system

auctions and the price of art the value of most important works of art is established by public auction either directly by an actual sale or indirectly by reference to other sales how the auction system works is thus a critical determinant of how the public s preferences are translated into the evaluation of artistic work the auction system is central in the determination of the incentives for artistic work and the efficiency of the auction system is a key determinant of the cost of creating and distributing works of art this paper contains a review of the burgeoning new research of the last decade that has been designed to shed light on how the art auction system actually works what it indicates about price formation and how well it performs we begin our discussion in section 2 with a short description of the mechanics of the auction system and then organize the remainder of our discussion around two major topics the first topic concerns how auction prices can be used to determine and compare overall price movements within the art market and other markets and the second topic concerns how the auction mechanism influences prices we

sorting versus screening search frictions and competing mechanisms in a market where sellers compete by posting trading mechanisms we allow for a general search technology and show that its features crucially affect the equilibrium mechanism price posting prevails when meetings are rival i e when a meeting by one buyer reduces another buyer s meeting probability under price posting buyers reveal their type by sorting ex ante only if the meeting technology is sufficiently non rival price posting is not an equilibrium multiple buyer types then visit the same sellers who screen ex post through auctions

optimal reservation prices in auctions the risk neutral independent private values ipv auction model produces curious results regarding the use of reservation prices no matter how many bidders the seller should announce a fixed reservation price above his true value this is notable since the seller gains by adopting an inefficient institution and puzzling because it conflicts with common practice the authors relax the ipv assumption characterize optimal reservation prices in a richer class of auctions and show that when information is correlated the seller s optimal reservation price converges to his true value often monotonically and rapidly as the number of bidders grows copyright 1996 by royal economic society

exclusionary manipulation of markets for pollution rights abstract strategic price manipulation can affect the distribution of transferable pollution rights across polluters and the efficiency of pollution control efforts prior research has concentrated on market manipulation by firms seeking only to minimize the sum of pollution rights costs and pollution abatement costs in this paper we explore the potential for the exclusionary manipulation of pollution permit markets intended to drive up the costs of one s rivals and we distinguish between the resource allocation effects of exclusionary manipulation and cost minimizing manipulation we find that exclusionary manipulation can sometimes worsen and sometimes ameliorate the abatement inefficiency which occurs under cost minimizing manipulation and that an overbuying rule can obviate or at least limit damages from this form of strategic behavior

buy price english auction abstract consider an english auction for a single object in which there is an option for a bidder to guarantee a purchase at a seller specified buy price b at any time we show that there exist v and v v such that a bidder purchases at the buy price immediately if his valuation v is no less than v or v v v and at least one other bidder is participating in the auction if b v v he purchases at the buy price once the current bid reaches a strategically chosen threshold price a properly set buy price increases expected social welfare and the expected utility of each agent when either buyers or seller are risk averse

all pay auctions with a buy price option all pay auctions this paper studies all pay auctions in which there is a buy price option for bidders to guarantee purchases at a seller specified price we analyze symmetric increasing bidding equilibria in the first and second price all pay auctions with the buy price option while the optimal buy price in the second price is higher than are those in the first price all pay auction both formats maintain the same expected profit with an endogenous entry process all pay auctions with the buy price can attract more consumers and ultimately reach a higher expected profit than does the uniform posted price selling mechanism jel d44 l11 l81

redefining recs part 1 untangling attributes and offsets abstract renewable energy and greenhouse gas emissions markets are currently in a state of confusion regarding the treatment of renewable energy certificates recs should consumers buy recs or emission offsets after examining this question the author concludes that recs are not equivalent to emission offset credits and as currently defined the retiring of a rec may have no impact on emissions from electric power generation consumers who purchase recs in voluntary green power markets are providing financial assistance to renewable generators in the form of a production subsidy generators that sell recs are not transferring emission reductions since they are unlikely to have ownership or the ability to quantify reductions using a commonly accepted standard more importantly recs currently sold in voluntary markets do not pass credible additionality tests and can at best be expected to have a market demand effect which will be less than the supply of recs on the market rec definitions that use the term environmental attributes or environmental benefits are almost universally ambiguous providing the mistaken impression that consumers are purchasing a good instead of subsidizing a public good

evaluating the dynamic performance of energy portfolios empirical evidence from the dea directional distance function abstract in recent years the complex global energy commodity market has led to increased uncertainty for energy investment returns and tremendous challenges for investors to design appropriate energy portfolios therefore we employ four popular portfolio methods to determine energy portfolios based on daily fossil fuel futures prices during 2006 2015 moreover we use the dea window analysis method and dea directional distance function to comprehensively evaluate the dynamic performance of these energy portfolios based on the efficiency perspective the empirical results indicate that first to increase investment returns the mean variance method that exclusively emphasizes the maximization of returns shows the best performance however in order to decrease the volatility and risk of investment returns the mean variance method that aims to resist risk more than make profits and the bootstrap historical simulation value at risk var method have the best performance second when the global financial crisis broke out in the second half of 2008 and energy markets experienced a sharp downturn in the second half of 2014 the dea efficiency of energy portfolios appeared relatively lower than those of their neighboring periods regardless of which portfolio method is employed finally the average dea efficiencies of energy portfolios are all higher than those of single energy investment throughout the sample period except when the equally weighted method and the information entropy comprehensive index method are used meanwhile the mean variance method that prefers profit making to risk resisting possesses the highest average dea efficiency among various methods concerned

assessment of the cost associated with wind generation prediction errors in a liberalized electricity market in this paper a probabilistic methodology for estimating the energy costs in the market for wind generators associated with wind prediction errors is proposed generators must buy or sell energy production deviations due to prediction errors when they bid in day ahead or hour ahead energy markets the prediction error is modeled through a probability density function that represents the accuracy of the prediction model production hourly energy deviations and their associated trading costs are then calculated three study cases based on real wind power installations in spain are analyzed the three study cases show that the error prediction costs can reach as much as 10 of the total generator energy incomes

implications of the eu emissions trading system for the south east europe regional electricity market as part of its climate policy the european union eu aims to reduce greenhouse gas ghg emissions levels by 20 by the year 2020 compared to 1990 levels although the eu is projected to reach this goal its achievement of objectives under its emissions trading system ets may be delayed by carbon leakage which is defined as a situation in which the reduction in emissions in the ets region is partially offset by an increase in carbon emissions in the non ets regions we study the interaction between emissions and hydropower availability in order to estimate the magnitude of carbon leakage in the south east europe regional electricity market see rem via a bottom up partial equilibrium framework we find that 6 3 to 40 5 of the emissions reduction achieved in the ets part of see rem could be leaked to the non ets part depending on the price of allowances somewhat surprisingly greater hydropower availability may increase emissions in the ets part of see rem however carbon leakage might be limited by demand response to higher electricity prices in the non ets area of see rem such carbon leakage can affect both the competitiveness of producers in ets member countries on the periphery of the ets and the achievement of eu targets for co2 emissions reduction meanwhile higher non ets electricity prices imply that the current policy can have undesirable outcomes for consumers in non ets countries while non ets producers would experience an increase in their profits due to higher power prices as well as exports the presence of carbon leakage in see rem suggests that current eu policy might become more effective when it is expanded to cover more countries in the future

optimal search auctions abstract we study the design of profit maximizing single unit auctions under the assumption that the seller needs to incur costs to contact prospective bidders and inform them about the auction with independent bidders types and possibly interdependent valuations the seller s problem can be reduced to a search problem in which the surplus is measured in terms of virtual utilities minus search costs compared to the socially efficient mechanism the optimal mechanism features fewer participants longer search conditional on the same set of participants and inefficient sequence of entry

aiming low and achieving it a long term analysis of a renewable policy in chile abstract we use an integrated resource planning model to assess the costs of meeting a 70 renewables target by 2050 in chile this model is equivalent to a long term equilibrium in electricity and renewable energy certificate rec markets under perfect competition we consider different scenarios of demand growth resource eligibility e g large hydropower and transmission system configuration our numerical results indicate that the sole characteristics of the available renewable resources in the country and reductions in technology costs will provide sufficient economic incentives for private investors to supply a fraction of renewables larger than 70 for a broad range of scenarios meaning that the proposed target will likely remain a symbolic government effort increasing transmission capacity between the northern and central interconnected systems could reduce total system cost by 400 million per year and increase the equilibrium share of nonconventional renewable energy ncre in the system from 45 to 52 without the need for any additional policy incentive surprisingly imposing a 70 of ncre by 2050 results in a rec price lower than the noncompliance fine used for the current target of 20 of ncre by 2025 the latter of which represents the country s maximum willingness to pay for the attributes of electricity supplied from ncre resources

market power and transferable property rights the appeal of using markets as a means of allocating scarce resources stems in large part from the assumption that a market will approximate the competitive ideal when competition is not a foregone conclusion the question naturally arises as to how a firm might manipulate the market to its own advantage this paper analyzes the issue of market power in the context of markets for transferable property rights first a model is developed that explains how a single firm with market power might exercise its influence this is followed by an examination of the model in the context of a particular policy problem the control of particulate sulfates in the los angeles region

buybacks with costly participation abstract posted price offers and first price auctions along with the multi unit discriminatory auction extension are two widely used mechanisms for allocating conservation contracts the choice between the two typically hinges on the trade off between the posted price s simplicity and the potential revenue gains of the auction in this paper we introduce a novel mechanism that attempts to bridge the gap between the performance of posted price offers and auctions a two price and lottery schedule combines the simplicity of the former with some of the flexibility of the latter using a model that incorporates agents cognitive and information costs of bidding we analyze how the ranking of allocative efficiency and cost effectiveness between the mechanisms varies as the wedge of participation costs increases when the number of bidders is endogenously determined by participation costs bid shading associated with a lack of competition in the auction compromises its cost effectiveness vis a vis the posted price and the lottery schedule we use data from three recent buybacks for fishing licenses conducted in maryland to calibrate our model and identify conditions under which the two price schedule outperforms the other mechanisms

the optimal listing strategies in online auctions this article proposes a unified framework to completely characterize the seller s optimal listing strategy in the online auction as a function of her rate of time impatience specifically the fixed price listing the regular auction and the buy it now bin auction are each a solution of the seller s single optimization problem under different values of the rate of intertemporal discount the perfectly patient seller adopts the regular auction the sellers with a medium range of time impatience adopt the bin auction and the most impatient of sellers adopt the fixed price listing moreover under mild conditions the reverse price is inversely related to the value of the seller s discount factor either within or across formats this in turn implies that the posted price in the fixed price sale is greater than the reserve price of the bin auction followed by that of the regular auction these predictions offer clear empirical implications

on absolute auctions and secret reserve prices from a theory viewpoint the use of auctions with zero public reserve prices also called absolute auctions or of auctions with secret reserve prices is somewhat puzzling despite being common by allowing that buyers differ in their processing of past data regarding how the participation rate varies with the auction format and how reserve prices are distributed when secret we show in a competitive environment that these auction formats may endogenously emerge we also analyze how buyers with various sophistications and sellers with various costs sort into the different formats thereby offering a range of testable predictions alternative approaches are reviewed

when outcomes are the reflection of the analysis criteria a review of the tradable green certificate assessments abstract the tradable green certificates tgc framework is a prevalent policy support scheme enacted to stimulate investments in electricity from renewable energy sources res e in several countries including sweden and norway the tgc framework is currently under reevaluation in this process academic literature plays a crucial role in reflecting the outcomes of this policy framework the outcomes however are often limited by the analysis criteria which reflect what has been accounted for or disregarded when assessing the performance of the tgc framework the analysis criteria also stress what is considered as a successful outcome given the importance of such criteria this paper presents an extensive and systemic literature review of academic publications assessing the performance of the tgc framework the findings are to provide an overview of the publications analysis criteria and outline their outcomes we also provide descriptive statistics for the publications and examine the average citation record of the publications that use various analysis criteria in order to explore their relative impact on later studies these findings can help policymakers put the assessments into perspective when reevaluating a country s tgc system they also suggest several intriguing directions for future studies in this field

selecting a selling institution auctions versus sequential search we consider the seller s choice between sequential search and an auction when selling n homogeneous units of a good in the presence of informational asymmetries discounting and transaction costs our analysis shows that the expected return per unit from sequential selling decreases in n the number of units being sold for the auction with suitable restrictions the expected return per unit increases in n thus sequential search is the preferred institution if n is small whereas the auction is preferred if n is large historical details of the evolution of livestock markets closely fit our theoretical results

competing trade mechanisms and monotone mechanism choice abstract we investigate the choice between posted prices and auctions of competing sellers with private valuations assuming that buyers face higher hassle costs in auctions we show the existence of monotone pure strategy equilibria where sellers offer posted prices rather than auctions if and only if they have a sufficiently high reservation value posted prices sell with lower probability but yield a larger revenue in case of trade using an empirical strategy to compare revenues of posted prices and auctions that takes selling probabilities explicitly into account we find our theoretical predictions supported by data from ebay auctions on ticket sales for the euro 2008 european football championship

market power in renewable portfolio standards abstract renewable portfolio standard rps which requires a certain percentage of electricity production from renewables has received considerable attention one emerging issue is the possibility of strategic behavior in the renewable energy certificate credit rec market and its spillover effects on the electricity market this paper develops dominant firm competitive fringe models that account for market power we show that market power could have significant impacts on the rec and power prices in particular when a nonrenewable generator is a dominant firm and a renewable generator is a competitive fringe the nonrenewable firm has a strong incentive to lower the rec price even to zero for avoiding rec costs the zero rec price would negate price impacts in the power market thereby mitigating market power of the dominant firm however this could lead to an underinvestment in renewables in the long run as subsidies received by renewables in form of recs vanish therefore regulatory agencies need to carefully oversee the market performance to ensure a healthy development of renewable industries under the rps policies

on discrimination in auctions with endogenous entry abstract when entry is exogenous strong buyers should be discriminated against weak buyers to maximize revenues myerson 1981 when entry is endogenous so that entrants expected payoffs do not depend on the proposed mechanism optimal discrimination takes a completely different form the revenue maximizing equilibrium requires that there should be no discrimination with respect to entrants irrespective of their ex ante characteristics besides those buyers who always participate should be discriminated against entrants independently of their strength these predictions are independent of the equilibrium selection when the number of potential entrants grows large the optimality of first price auctions is also discussed jel d44 h57

distance to hospital and children s use of preventive care is being closer better and for whom i introduction this article examines the effect of distance to hospital on the utilization of preventive care among children many poor children lacking alternative providers rely on hospitals and clinics for preventive care moreover in many poor neighborhoods the majority of private doctors offices are located in buildings adjacent to a hospital thus hospitals indirectly serve to attract physician services that would otherwise be lacking in the neighborhood this pattern of service provision raises several concerns first it is inefficient for children to be receiving preventive care directly from hospitals because preventive care can be delivered more cheaply in doctors offices and doctors offices also provide greater continuity of care an index of quality second even when children are receiving care in a doctor s office adjacent to a hospital continuation of that service may be jeopardized if the hospital were to close in this study we use distance to hospital as a proxy for access to medical services to examine the effect of distance to hospital on the use of preventive care services if the use of these services falls with distance other things being equal then we interpret this as evidence of lack of access to alternative providers most previous studies of the effects of distance have concentrated on specific geographical areas and or hospitalizations for specific procedures we are therefore unaware of any previous studies that have focused on the effects of distance on the utilization of preventive care among children 1 we use a national sample of children created by matching records from the national longitudinal survey of youth s child mother nlscm file with the american hospital association s 1990 hospital survey we allow the effects of distance to vary with race ethnicity insurance status and degree of urbanicity we control for other factors that might affect utilization of preventive care by including a rich set of control variables and by estimating models that include either city dummy variables or mother fixed effects in particular city dummies control for unobserved differences across cities in public transportation services and population density mother fixed effects control for unobserved differences in preferences for preventive health care robust estimates across models allow us to rule out these alternative explanations for why distance to hospital might affect different groups differentially these innovations address the important question of whether children who rely on hospitals for preventive ca re do so because they lack access to other providers we find that distance to hospital has significant effects on access to preventive care only among central city black children for these children each additional mile from the hospital is associated with a 3 decline in the probability of having had a checkup from a mean baseline of 74 this effect is comparable to the 3 increase in the probability of having a checkup which is associated with having private health insurance coverage rather than being uninsured a striking result is that among these children the size of the distance effect is similar for both the privately insured and those with medicaid suggesting that even black urban children with private health insurance have difficulty obtaining access to preventive care outside the area around hospitals thus for this group questions of access to providers may be as important as insurance coverage in predicting use of preventive care ii children who rely on hospitals for primary care prior research suggests that children who are members of minorities uninsured covered by medicaid or residing in rural areas are all more likely to rely on hospitals for preventive care this section discusses each of these groups in turn bloom 1990 demonstrates that nationally black children are twice as likely as white children to receive care in an institutional setting such as a clinic or emergency room and that they are more likely to be attended by residents than by staff physicians

does distance matter for institutional delivery in rural india this article estimates the causal effect of distance to health facility on in facility birth in rural india taking into account the endogenous placement of the health facility we find that women living farther away from the health facilities are less likely to give birth at a health facility each additional kilometre from the nearest health facility is associated with a 4 4 decline in the probability of in facility birth policy simulation results indicate that providing access to a health facility within 5 km would increase institutional delivery by 10 overall our findings confirm that distance is an important barrier to in facility births in rural india

sustainable transmission planning in imperfectly competitive electricity industries balancing economic and environmental outcomes abstract we explore the role of a transmission system operator tso that builds a transmission line to accommodate renewable energy in order to lower emissions as required by government policy in contrast to central planning a tso in a deregulated electricity industry can only indirectly influence outcomes through its choice of the transmission line capacity via a bi level model we show that this results in less transmission capacity and with limited emissions control in a perfectly competitive industry vis a vis a benchmark centrally planned system a carbon charge on industry that fully accounts for the cost of pollution damage leads to a perfect alignment of incentives and maximised social welfare only under perfect competition by contrast a carbon charge may actually lower social welfare under a cournot oligopoly as the resulting reduction in consumption facilitates the further exercise of market power

revenue management without commitment dynamic pricing and periodic flash sales a seller has a fixed number of goods to sell by a deadline at each time he posts a regular price and decides whether to hold a flash sale over time buyers privately enter the market and strategically time their purchases if a buyer does not purchase when she arrives she can pay an attention cost to recheck the regular price afterwards or she can wait for future flash sales where she may obtain a good at a discounted price in the unique markov perfect equilibrium the seller sporadically holds flash sales to lower the stock of goods a flash sale increases the willingness to pay of future buyers but decreases the willingness to pay of buyers who arrive early in the game when it is very likely that a buyer will obtain a good in a flash sale the seller holds a big initial flash sale for all but one unit of the good

phantom bidding against heterogeneous bidders abstract if ipv bidders are distributionally heterogeneous then a revenue maximizing english auctioneer will in general find it optimal to use a non constant reserve price that is a function of the observed bid sequence an example is provided

auctions versus negotiations which is the more profitable way to sell a company an auction with no reserve price or an optimally structured negotiation with one less bidder we show under reasonable assumptions that the auction is always preferable when bidders signals are independent for affiliated signals the result holds under certain restrictions on the seller s choice of negotiating mechanism the result suggests that the value of negotiating skill is small relative to the value of additional competition the paper also shows how the analogies between monopoly theory and auction theory can help derive new results in auction theory jel d44 g34 there are close analogies between standard price theory and the theory of auctions in an absolute english auction in which the price rises continuously until only one bidder remains and the seller is required to accept the final bid the sale price equals the lowest competitive price at which supply equals demand in the theory of optimal auctions the seller is treated as a monopolist who can choose any

a model of competing selling mechanisms abstract a model where sellers choose sequentially between any two selling mechanisms is studied with monotonicity and minimum mechanism difference there exists a unique equilibrium where all sellers choose the mechanism of higher per seller surplus at a critical number of sellers

renewable generation expansion under different support schemes a stochastic equilibrium approach abstract following the deregulation of electricity markets a current challenge of policy makers is to facilitate the transition to a sustainable power system at the highest welfare for society in this paper we investigate the efficiency of different support schemes such as a feed in tariff a feed in premium and tradable green certificates with respect to incentivizing the required investments in renewable generation we consider a number of generation expansion problems and formulate stochastic equilibrium models that account for uncertainty in demand and renewable supply the risk aversion of investors and the competitiveness of the market the problem of the policy maker is formulated as a mathematical program with equilibrium constraints mpec and as a non linear complementarity problem ncp for the feed in schemes and the certificate market respectively our models are solved for a small illustrative example and a larger case study based on the danish power system the results confirm that the main driver for the optimal choice of renewable support scheme is the aversion of power producers towards price and volume risk while the competitiveness of the market rarely affects such choice

mechanism choice and the buy it now auction a structural model of competing buyers and sellers a striking feature of many online sales platforms is the coexistence of multiple sales mechanisms items on ebay for instance are frequently offered through auctions posted prices and buy it now auctions in this article i study how this mechanism multiplicity influences the welfare of buyers and sellers i specify and estimate a structural model of mechanism choice in online markets in which i consider both sides of the market on the demand side buyers choices among available listings are equilibrium outcomes of an entry game on the supply side sellers make equilibrium decisions when choosing sales mechanisms and prices i estimate this model using data from sales of baseball tickets on ebay and calculate consumer and seller rents in three markets the actual market with all three sales mechanisms and two counterfactual markets with auctions and fixed prices or only fixed price listings respectively i find that the addition of auctions to fixed price markets hurts sellers and risk averse buyers but benefits risk neutral buyers additionally the consumer surplus increases when buy it now auctions are offered but the seller surplus is reduced further i discuss the intuition for the cause of this result

pricing and allocation for quality differentiated online services we explore the problem of pricing and allocation of unique one time digital products in the form of data streams we look at the short term problem where the firm has a capacitated shared resource and multiple products or service levels we formulate the allocatively efficient generalized vickrey auction gva for our setting and point out the computational challenges in determining the individual discriminatory transfer payments we propose an alternative uniform price computationally efficient revenue maximizing knapsack formulation called the multiple vickrey auction mva while not incentive compatible the mva mechanism achieves bounded posterior regret and can be solved in real time it has the added benefit of realizing imputed commodity prices for the various services a feature lacking in the discriminatory gva approach for service providers that are concerned about the incentive compatibility but want imputed service prices we suggest a maximal mva mmva uniform pricing scheme that trades off revenue maximization for allocative efficiency for sake of completeness we discuss the properties of a first price pay your bid scheme while np hard and not incentive compatible this formulation has the perceived benefit of cognitive simplicity on the parts of sellers and bidders

when renewable portfolio standards meet cap and trade regulations in the electricity sector market interactions profits implications and policy redundancy emission trading programs c t and renewable portfolio standards rps are two common tools used by policymakers to control ghg emissions in the energy and other energy intensive sectors little is known however as to the policy implications resulting from these concurrent regulations especially given that their underlying policy goals and regulatory schemes are distinct this paper applies both an analytical model and a computational model to examine the short run implications of market interactions and policy redundancy the analytical model is used to generate contestable hypotheses while the numerical model is applied to consider more realistic market conditions we have two central findings first lowering the co2 c t cap might penalize renewable units and increasing the rps level could sometimes benefit coal and oil and make natural gas units worse off second making one policy more stringent would weaken the market incentive which the other policy relies upon to attain its intended policy target

arriving in time estimation of english auctions with a stochastic number of bidders we develop a new econometric approach for the estimation of second price ascending bid auctions with a stochastic number of bidders our empirical framework considers the arrival process of new bidders as well as the distribution of bidders valuations of objects being auctioned by observing the timing of bidder arrival the model is identified even when the number of potential bidders is stochastic and unknown the relevance of our approach is illustrated with an empirical application using a unique dataset of art auctions on ebay our results suggest a higher impact of sellers reputation on bidders valuations than previously reported in cross sectional studies but the impact of reputation on bidder arrival is largely insignificant interestingly a seller s reputation impacts not only the actions of the bidders but the actions of the seller as well in particular experience and a good reputation increase the probability of a seller posting items for sale on longer lasting auctions which we find inc