Meeting Minutes - 7 January 2009

Today I discussed the paper entitled "Slow Dutch Auctions" by Octavian Carare and Michael Rothkopf (Management Science, 51(3), 365-373, 2005). These are a few of the issues that were raised during the discussion:

• Is it realistic to think that the results of Lucking-Reiley (1999) may be due to transaction costs? Aren't there other more plausible explanations (e.g., some form of bounded rationality)? Aren't transaction costs too low to have a significant effect?
• Why do the authors assume randomly arriving bidders in their game-theoretic analysis? What are the implications of this assumption?
• How would the analysis in the paper change if we take into account that there can be many auctions (simultaneously or sequentially) of similar objects? This may create competition among auctioneers. What effect can be expected from this?
• Should we regard the results in the paper as surprising or not? Do they make sense intuitively? Can the analysis be generalized?
• In what way can agent-based research contribute to our understanding of auction mechanisms? What could be the added value of agent-based research over game-theoretic and experimental research?

Ludo