Meeting Minutes - 21 January 2009

The 21st of January Peter Berends presented "The Impact of Clock Speeds on Bidders’ Arousal in Dutch Auctions". A paper by M. Adam, J. Krämer, C. Weinhardt (2008). 

In this study an experiment was conducted to show the impact of clock speed on "competitive arousal" and seller revenue. This paper was of interest to us, since in order to create intelligent agents that support human actors in the Dutch Flower Network we need to investigate the influence of speed in Dutch auctions.

When considering Adam's et al. study, the results in regard to seller revenue in this experiment are somewhat contradictory to prior experiments. It was found that seller revenue in a slower auction was not significantly different from fast auctions. Furthermore, differences in the variance of seller revenue between the slow and fast auctions were observed. Faster auctions have greater variance. This led to authors to believe that competitive arousal is not a function of elapsed time alone. This was previously asserted by Katok and Kwasnica (2008). The results clearly prove that, higher levels of skin conductivity are found in fast auctions compared to low. This means that arousal is higher for fast auctions.

In the discussion between the participants at LARGE we discussed whether the variance between the slow and the fast auction could be explained by the fact that subjects might become bored when participating in the auction experiment. They might become bored, because they play against only one other participant and in the slow auction the maximum length is theoretically 16:40min.