prices and the winner s curse we usually assume that increases in supply allocation by rationing and exclusion of potential buyers reduce prices but all these activities raise the expected price in an important set of cases when common value assets are sold furthermore when we make the assumptions needed to rule out these anomalies for symmetric buyers small asymmetries among the buyers necessarily cause the anomalies to reappear our results help explain rationing in initial public offerings and outcomes of spectrum auctions we illustrate our results in the wallet game and in another new game we introduce the maximum game

competitive procurement of ancillary services by an independent system operator this paper discusses the competitive procurement of ancillary services by an independent system operator iso the paper assumes the existence of an underlying market for energy and explains why this energy market must be accompanied by a market for ancillary services these services include operating reserves and automatic generation control agc both of which may require generators that are infra marginal in the energy market to choose between supplying energy or ancillary services the paper discusses the design of an auction for these services that has formed the basis for the california iso s ancillary services market the paper also discusses the real time dispatch of ancillary services

information school choice and academic achievement evidence from two experiments we examine a natural experiment and a field experiment that provided direct information on school test scores to lower income families in a public school choice plan receiving information significantly increases the fraction of parents choosing higher performing schools parents with high scoring alternatives nearby were more likely to choose nonguaranteed schools with higher test scores using random variation from each experiment we find that attending a higher scoring school increases student test scores the results imply that school choice will most effectively increase academic achievement for disadvantaged students when parents have easy access to test score information and good options from which to choose

do better schools matter parental valuation of elementary education the evaluation of numerous school reforms requires an understanding of the value of better schools given the difficulty of calculating the relationship between school quality and student outcomes i turn to another method and use house prices to infer the value parents place on school quality i look within school districts at houses located on attendance district boundaries houses then differ only by the elementary school the child attends i thereby effectively remove the variation in neighborhoods taxes and school spending i find that parents are willing to pay 2 5 percent more for a 5 percent increase in test scores this finding is robust to a number of sensitivity checks

information market incentives and student performance evidence from a regression discontinuity design in brazil abstract we use a discontinuity on the test score disclosure rule for the national secondary education examination in brazil to test whether test score disclosure affects student performance in public and private schools we find that the impact of test score disclosure on student performance differs between public and private schools our results suggest that this difference is driven by differences in the market incentives faced by these two types of school

imperfect choice or imperfect attention understanding strategic thinking in private information games to understand the thinking process in private information games we use mousetracking to record which payoffs subjects attend to the games have three information states and vary in strategic complexity subjects consistently deviate from nash equilibrium choices and often fail to look at payoffs which they need to in order to compute an equilibrium response choices and lookups are similar when stakes are higher when cluster analysis is used to group subjects according to lookup patterns and choices three clusters appear to correspond approximately to level 3 level 2 and level 1 thinking in level k models and a fourth cluster is consistent with inferential mistakes as for example in qre or cursed equilibrium theories deviations from nash play are associated with failure to look at the necessary payoffs the time durations of looking at key payoffs can predict choices to some extent at the individual level and at the trial by trial level

modeling and testing for heterogeneity in observed strategic behavior experimental data have consistently shown diversity in beliefs as well as in actions among experimental subjects this paper presents and compares alternative behavioral econometric models for the

market clearing with stochastic security part i formulation the first of this two paper series formulates a stochastic security constrained multi period electricity market clearing problem with unit commitment the stochastic security criterion accounts for a pre selected set of random generator and line outages with known historical failure rates and involuntary load shedding as optimization variables unlike the classical deterministic reserve constrained unit commitment here the reserve services are determined by economically penalizing the operation of the market by the expected load not served the proposed formulation is a stochastic programming problem that optimizes concurrently with the pre contingency social welfare the expected operating costs associated with the deployment of the reserves following the contingencies this stochastic programming formulation is solved in the second companion paper using mixed integer linear programming methods two cases are presented a small transmission constrained three bus network scheduled over a horizon of four hours and the ieee reliability test system scheduled over 24 h the impact on the resulting generation and reserve schedules of transmission constraints and generation ramp limits of demand side reserve of the value of load not served and of the constitution of the pre selected set of contingencies are assessed

one two three infinity newspaper and lab beauty contest experiments beauty contest is a game in which participants have to choose typically a number in 0 100 the winner being the person whose number is closest to a proportion of the average of all chosen numbers we describe and analyze beauty contest experiments run in newspapers in uk spain and germany and find stable patterns of behavior across them despite the uncontrollability of these experiments these results are then compared with lab experiments involving undergraduates and game theorists as subjects in what must be one of the largest empirical corroborations of interactive behavior ever tried we claim that all observed behavior across a wide variety of treatments and subject pools can be interpretedas iterative reasoning level 1 reasoning level 2 reasoning and level 3 reasoning are commonly observed in all the samples while the equilibrium choice level maximum reasoning is only prominently chosen by newspaper readers and theorists the results show the empirical power of experiments run with large subject pools and open the door for more experimental work performed on the rich platform offered by newspapers and magazines

the role of market forces in assuring contractual performance the conditions under which transactors can use the market repeat purchase mechanism of contract enforcement are examined increased price is shown to be a means of assuring contractual performance a necessary and sufficient condition for performance is the existence of price sufficiently above salvageable production costs so that the nonperforming firm loses a discounted steam of rents on future sales which is greater than the wealth increase from nonperformance this will generally imply a market price greater than the perfectly competitive price and rationalize investments in firm specific assets advertising investments thereby become a positive indicator of likely performance

efficient use of generator resources in emerging electricity markets in the emerging electricity market generators sell ancillary services as well as energy to the system operator pricing of ancillary services makes the scheduling of units more difficult due to the resulting unit cost curves the new climate will encourage generators to exploit the flexibility of their units in terms of operating modes this paper uses the augmented hopfield neural network to deal with ancillary service prices specifically reserve and ramping prices submitted by generators and to schedule units with a choice of operating modes

strategic pricing signalling and costly information acquisition abstract consider a market where an informed monopolist sets the price for a good or asset with a value unknown to potential buyers upon observing the price buyers may pay some cost for information about the value before deciding on purchases under a belief restriction which generalizes the idea of the cho kreps intuitive criterion we establish a version of the grossman stiglitz paradox there is no separating equilibrium with fully revealing prices yet we also resolve the paradox there is a unique equilibrium and as the cost of information becomes small the equilibrium approaches the full information outcome and prices become perfectly revealing

reserve requirements to efficiently manage intra zonal congestion the security constrained unit commitment problem schedules power generators to minimize cost subject to operating constraints reserve requirements ensure that reserve is available to re balance the system following a contingency but do not guarantee reliability in congested systems where reserve activation is limited by transmission constraints operators improve reserve deliverability by limiting power flows and controlling the location of reserves zones are used to address inter zonal congestion but operators lack efficient ways to handle intra zonal congestion we propose dynamically relating minimum reserve levels to transmission stress in a computationally efficient approach that complements existing reserve models from the literature analysis on the ieee rts 96 test case demonstrates the approach can mitigate intra zonal congestion more economically than traditional reserve policies

the bubble game an experimental study of speculation we propose a bubble game that involves sequential trading of an asset commonly known to be valueless because no trader is ever sure to be last in the market sequence the game allows for a bubble at the nash equilibrium when there is no cap on the maximum price we run experiments both with and without a price cap structural estimation of behavioral game theory models suggests that quantal responses and analogy based expectations are important drivers of speculation

is step j thinking an arbitrary modelling restriction or a fact of human nature abstract in boundedly rational rule learning in a guessing game games and economic behavior 16 1996 we combined nagel s 1995 model of boundedly rational players with a law of effect learning model and the synthesis outperformed alternative theories when confronting nagel s data in that model there were four boundedly rational behavioral rules step j j 0 1 2 3 each corresponding to an integer level of depth of reasoning it is legitimate to ask for a justification of the restriction to these integer rules why is it not reasonable to suppose that some player believes that 50 of the population is step 0 and 50 is step 1 and so himself adopts something like a step 1 5 rule this paper constructs a tractable model with potentially infinitely many non integer rules and conducts comparison tests the main conclusion is that allowing for non integer rules does not help to explain the data therefore by occam s razor the integer rule model is preferred these results suggest that step j thinking is a fact of human nature rather that an arbitrary modelling restriction

energy and reserve market designs with explicit consideration to lost opportunity costs the primary goal of this work is to investigate the basic energy and reserve dispatch optimization cooptimization in the setting of a pool based market of particular interest is the modeling of lost opportunity cost introduced by reserve allocation the authors derive the marginal costs of energy and reserves under a variety of market designs they also analyze existence algorithm and multiplicity of optimal solutions the results of this study are used to support the reserve market design and implementation in iso new england control area

a probabilistic reserve market incorporating interruptible load a probabilistic method for a pool based combined energy and reserve market which considers both generators and interruptible loads ils is proposed in this paper we minimize generation production cost together with the cost associated with expected energy not supplied eens due to outages of generating units and failures of ils to supply the reserve when required the proposed settlement scheme allocates equitably cost of reserve among generators and ils given that the method takes into account reliability of individual generators and ils the proposed scheme provides incentives for all market participants to improve their performance a number of case studies are carried out to illustrate the impact of participant s characteristics on the reserve cost allocation

reliability pricing and quality control abstract the purpose of this paper is to construct a theoretical framework which allows a manufacturer to examine the tradeoffs between pricing reliability design and quality control issues in particular the paper investigates effects of risk aversion on the relative prominence of one or the other policy instruments in addition the results of extensive numerical analyses are presented relating basic managerial guidelines with price reliability and quality control

transmission congestion management in competitive electricity markets this paper studies the management of costs associated with transmission constraints i e transmission congestion costs in a competitive electricity market the paper examines two approaches for dealing with these costs the first approach is based on a nodal pricing framework and forms the basis of the so called pool model the paper also provides an analysis of financial instruments proposed to complement nodal pricing and includes illustrative test results on a large scale system the second approach is based on cost allocation procedures proposed for the so called bilateral model the paper explains the basis for this model including a game theoretic evaluation of some of its aspects both the pool and bilateral models have been at the center of the electric utility restructuring debate in california

optimal scheduling of spinning reserve effective control of spinning reserve can provide substantial cost reductions in large power systems this paper suggests that this goal can he achieved by tightly integrating a probabilistic reserve assessment with the unit commitment uc function this enables the reliability of individual units and the uncertainty of the load forecast to be considered for short term scheduling the generation can then be scheduled to meet a given risk index it is further argued that the optimal value of this risk index should be selected on the basis of a tradeoff between the total schedule cost obtained from the uc solution and the expected cost of energy not served which can be derived from the probabilistic reserve assessment finally the problem of over commitment of reserve in lagrangian relaxation based uc is reduced by means of a new unit decommitment technique incorporating a look ahead feature

step level reasoning and bidding in auctions step level models of reasoning slr proved to be very successful in predicting behavior in the beauty contest game recently a quantified version of the model was suggested as a more general model of thinking in particular it was found that the distribution of choices could be represented by a poisson distribution i test the model in stylized first and second price common value sealed bid auctions equilibrium for both auction types prescribes that players undercut each other and profits are small the slr prediction on the other hand is different for the two auctions nash equilibrium predicts the outcomes poorly the slr model predicts the outcomes well in the second price auction however while bids in the first price auction could be represented by a poisson distribution this could not be attributed to step level reasoning

strategic sophistication and attention in games an eye tracking study abstract we used eye tracking to measure the dynamic patterns of visual information acquisition in two player normal form games participants played one shot games in which either neither or only one of the players had a dominant strategy first we performed a mixture models cluster analysis to group participants into types according to the pattern of visual information acquisition observed in a single class of games then we predicted agents choices in different classes of games and observed that patterns of visual information acquisition were game invariant our method allowed us to predict whether the decision process would lead to equilibrium choices or not and to attribute out of equilibrium responses to limited cognitive capacities or social motives our results suggest the existence of individually heterogeneous but stable patterns of visual information acquisition based on subjective levels of strategic sophistication and social preferences

heterogeneous quantal response equilibrium and cognitive hierarchies we explore an equilibrium model of games where behavior is given by logit response functions but payoff responsiveness and beliefs about others responsiveness are heterogeneous we study two substantively different ways of extending quantal response equilibrium qre to this setting 1 heterogeneus qre where players share identical correct beliefs about the distribution of payoff responsiveness and 2 truncated qre where players have downward looking beliefs systematically underestimating others responsiveness we show that the cognitive hierarchy model is a special case of truncated qre we conduct experiments designed to differentiate these approaches we find significant evidence of payoff responsive stochastic choice and of heterogeneity and downward looking beliefs in some games

the nature of information and its effect on bidding behavior laboratory evidence in a first price common value auction abstract we study in the laboratory a series of first price sealed bid auctions of a common value good bidders face three types of information private information public information and common uncertainty auctions are characterized by the relative size of these three information elements only half of our subjects bid differently depending on whether the last piece of information obtained is private or public but they do not react to each type of information as predicted by theory the other half of the subjects do not distinguish between private and public information and either consistently underbid or consistently overbid

can relaxation of beliefs rationalize the winner s curse an experimental study we use a second price common value auction called the maximal game to experimentally study whether the winner s curse wc can be explained by models which retain best response behavior but allow for inconsistent beliefs we compare behavior in a regular version of the maximal game where the wc can be explained by inconsistent beliefs to behavior in versions where such explanations are less plausible we find little evidence of differences in behavior overall our study casts a serious doubt on theories that posit the wc is driven by beliefs

a comparison of naive and experienced bidders in common value offer auctions a laboratory analysis laboratory economics experiments typically use financially motivated students as subjects an ongoing issue is whether this is an appropriate subject pool since the students are typically inexperienced in the types of decision making required of them in the lab this paper addresses this issue in the context of common value offer auctions as we compare the behaviour of experienced business executives in the construction contract industry experts with that of naive student subjects results of previous research of this sort have been equivocal in some cases experts make the same errors as novices in other cases they do not hogarth and reder i987 a series of sealed bid common value offer auctions in which bidders compete for the right to supply an item of unknown cost were conducted inherent to common value auctions cvas is an adverse selection problem which may result in below normal or negative profits the winner s curse experimental studies have documented the presence of the winner s curse with financially motivated student subjects in high price demand side auctions kagel et al i986 kagel and levin i986 the experiments reported here generalise these earlier studies from bid to offer auctions also in employing offer auctions we establish a setting with which our experts are familiar thus allowing their experience the best chance to manifest itself

prices as signals of product quality this paper is concerned with the provision of quality in markets in which consumers have only imperfect information the analysis focuses on a market for a product that can be produced at different quality levels all consumers prefer higher to lower quality but they may differ in their willingness to pay for quality producers can produce any quality they like but higher qualities are more costly to produce the information in this market is imperfect in the sense that the exact quality chosen by a firm is known only to the firm itself some information about the quality of a firm s product will however reach its potential customers even if they do not make any special effort to acquire it within the framework suggested here two conclusions are drawn first prices may serve as signals which exactly differentiate the available quality levels that is there exists a fulfilledexpectations equilibrium at which each price signals a unique quality level second the pricesignals are not arbitrary each price signal exceeds the marginal cost of producing the quality it signals such a mark up depends on the nature of the product specific information received by consumers the poorer the information the higher the mark up

optimal dispatch of a system based on offers and bids a mixed integer lp formulation the federal energy regulatory commission s ferc orders 888 and 889 will have far reaching consequences on the operation and dispatch of electric power systems a common element of the change is that of dispatching the system based on offers and bids to sell and buy unbundled commodities this paper formulates and solves the optimal dispatch problem as a mixed integer linear program such a formulation allows the acceptance of offers with minimum takes arising from generator characteristics

how accountability pressure on failing schools affects student achievement abstract although an emerging body of evidence has shown that the threat of sanctions on low performing schools can raise student test scores in the short run the extent to which these test score improvements are due to schools manipulation of the accountability system has remained uncertain in this paper i provide two new strands of evidence to evaluate the relative importance of educational reforms and gaming behavior in generating test score gains by threatened schools first using a regression discontinuity design that exploits florida s system of imposing sanction threats on the basis of a cutoff level of performance i estimate medium run effects on student test scores from having attended a threatened elementary school threat induced math improvements from elementary school largely persist at least through the first 1 to 2 years of middle school while evidence for persistence of reading improvements is less consistent second i analyze the effects of sanction threats on various features of educational production and i find that sanction threats raise school spending on instructional technology curricular development and teacher training both strands of evidence are consistent with a predominant role for educational reforms in generating test score gains by threatened schools

public sector performance measurement and stakeholder support abstract over the past several decades there has been dramatically increased attention paid to measuring the performance of public sector and nonprofit organizations in the united states and elsewhere recent research has indicated that public sector and nonprofit organizations are responsive to performance measurement in both productive and unproductive ways however it is not yet known how stakeholders respond to this measurement this paper makes use of a unique panel survey dataset of the population of elementary and middle schools in the state of florida to directly investigate this question we exploit the fact that florida changed its school grading system in 2002 and study the degree to which private contributions to schools are responsive to the information contained in school grades we find evidence that school grades can have substantial effects on a school s ability to obtain private contributions we also observe that schools serving different clienteles are treated differently in response to changes in school grades

6 revenue effects and information processing in english common value auctions an experiment analyzing behavior in english common value auctions is reported english auctions raise more revenue than first price auctions only when bidders do not suffer from a strong winner s curse agents employ other bidders dropout prices along with their private information as nash bidding theory predicts however a simple and natural signal averaging rule which does not require recognizing the adverse selection effect of winning the auction better characterizes the data than the nash rule monte carlo simulations using fiml estimates of the signal averaging rule predict a number of data characteristics not directly employed in the estimation procedure copyright 1996 by american economic association

who thinks about the competition managerial ability and strategic entry in us local telephone markets we examine us local telephone markets shortly after the telecommunications act of 1996 the data suggest that older experienced educated managers tend to enter markets with fewer competitors this motivates a structural econometric model based on behavioral game theory that allows heterogeneity in managers ability to correctly conjecture competitor behavior we find that manager characteristics are key determinants in managerial ability furthermore our estimate of ability predicts out of sample success counterfactuals provide insight into the industry s struggles despite substantial indirect subsidies it is only when the ability to correctly conjecture competitor behavior is high that firms enter empty markets

revisiting games of incomplete information with analogy based expectations this paper studies the effects of analogy based expectations in static two player games of incomplete information players are assumed to be boundedly rational in the way they forecast their opponent s state contingent strategy they bundle states into analogy classes and play best responses to their opponent s average strategy in those analogy classes we provide general properties of analogy based expectation equilibria and apply the model to a variety of well known games we characterize conditions on the analogy partitions for successful coordination in coordination games under incomplete information rubinstein a 1989 the electronic mail game strategic behavior under almost common knowledge amer econ rev 79 385 391 we show how analogy grouping of the receiver may facilitate information transmission in crawford and sobel s cheap talk games crawford v p sobel j 1982 strategic information transmission econometrica 50 1431 1451 and we show how analogy grouping may give rise to betting in zero sum betting games such as those studied to illustrate the no trade theorem

report cards the impact of providing school and child test scores on educational markets this paper studies study the impact of providing school and child test scores on subsequent test scores prices and enrollment in markets with multiple public and private providers a randomly selected half of the sample villages markets received report cards this increased test scores by 0 11 standard deviations decreased private school fees by 17 percent and increased primary enrollment by 4 5 percent heterogeneity in the treatment impact by initial school quality is consistent with canonical models of asymmetric information information provision facilitates better comparisons across providers improves market efficiency and raises child welfare through higher test scores higher enrollment and lower fees

quantal response and nonequilibrium beliefs explain overbidding in maximum value auctions we report new experimental data on a simple common value auction to investigate the extent to which bidding can be explained by logit qre in combination with different models about bidder beliefs cursed equilibrium level k and cognitive hierarchy there is a close correspondence between the predicted bidding patterns in those models and the distribution of observed bids the pattern of median bids in the data consists of a combination of overbidding with low signals and near value bidding with higher signals logit qre with heterogeneous bidders approximates this pattern combining qre with any of the other models of belief formation leads to a closer match with the data all the estimated models predict only small treatment effects across different versions of the game consistent with the data we also reanalyze an earlier dataset for the same game ivanov et al 2010 which exhibited much more overbidding and reach similar qualitative conclusions

energy and reserve dispatch in a multi zone electricity market competitive bidding for ancillary services a s in addition to bidding for energy is increasingly recognized as an important part of electricity markets in this paper an lp based approach is presented for solving the multi product i e energy and a s products multi zone area physical market dispatch problem the approach can explicitly represent various constraints such as reserve requirement constraints network security limits and sharing of constrained resource capacity e g maximum unit generation between energy and reserve the joint dispatch method which dispatches energy and reserve market concurrently is extended to allow inter zonal reserve trading in a multi zone competitive pool numerical examples are included to demonstrate the salient characteristics of the joint dispatch solution

priced based operation in an auction market structure open transmission access is a new legal requirement within the electric power industry interchange will require evaluation of the existing conditions to determine if the product can be delivered at the time required and at the level awarded through the bidding or negotiation process this paper seeks to identify the likely deregulation details for a full market implementation when native load is considered equal to any other third party load comparability this paper seeks to identify the technical issues such as standards and algorithms necessary for changing the national infrastructure from a vertically integrated industry to a horizontally integrated industry

reliability and reserve in competitive electricity market scheduling power systems are typically scheduled at least cost subject to operational and security constraints generally no account is taken of generator reliability when scheduling units also the security criteria which include reserve are usually deterministic in nature this paper proposes a method to consider generator reliability explicitly in the scheduling problem a competitive structure is proposed which includes a market for reserve this is formulated as an augmented lagrangian dual function and is solved using a new recurrent neural network the price for reserve is used along with the unit reliability to find a balance between the cost of reserve and the risk of not providing it

a comment on can relaxation of beliefs rationalize the winner s curse an experimental study ivanov levin and niederle 2010 use a common value second price auction experiment to reject beliefs based explanations for the winner s curse iln s conclusion however stems from the misuse of theoretical arguments beliefs based models are even compatible with some observations from iln s experiment

equilibrium selection and bounded rationality in symmetric normal form games abstract we develop and test a model of initial play for symmetric normal form games with multiple nash equilibria first we specify an encompassing model that incorporates both equilibrium selection principles and boundedly rational behavioral models we then design experimental games that can identify a variety of equilibrium selection principles model comparisons and hypothesis tests indicate that 1 boundedly rational behavior is prevalent in initial period play 2 homogeneous population models can be strongly rejected in favor of heterogeneous population models and 3 deductive selection principles add no statistically significant contribution to explaining the data

lying for strategic advantage rational and boundedly rational misrepresentation of intentions starting from hendricks and mcafee s 2000 example of the allies decision to feint at calais and attack at normandy on d day this paper models misrepresentation of intentions to competitors or enemies allowing for the possibility of bounded strategic rationality and rational players responses to it yields a sensible account of lying via costless noiseless messages in many cases the model has generically unique pure strategy sequential equilibria in which rational players exploit boundedly rational players but are not themselves fooled in others the model has generically essentially unique mixed strategy sequential equilibria in which rational players strategies protect all players from exploitation