Environmental markets have several institutional features that provide a new context for the use of auctions and that have not been studied previously. This paper reports on laboratory experiments testing three auction forms-uniform and discriminatory price sealed-bid auctions and an ascending clock auction. We test the ability of subjects to tacitly or explicitly collude in order to maximize profits. Our main result is that the discriminatory and uniform price auctions produce greater revenues than the clock auction, both with and without explicit communication. The clock appears to facilitate successful collusion, both because of its sequential structure and because it allows bidders to focus on one dimension of cooperation (quantity) rather than two (price and quantity).© 2009 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.

No abstract

In what follows, I develop a discrete choice framework where home buyer (i) chooses house (j) in geographic area (a) in year (t) from a choice set with budget constraint w i . The consumer has an outside option of not buying a house with a utility level normalized to zero. Consumer i's indirect utility from the purchase of a home is a function of the cost, which has two components: 1) the transaction price, H jat , and 2) the net present value (NPV) of the expected stream of future fuel payments, F jat . Utility is also a function of observable home attributes, X jat , unobservable home attributes,ξ jat , neighborhood-year specific amenities, λ at , and individual taste ε ijat as follows.The marginal utility of money is represented by η. The implied discount rate is the discount rate that consumers would have to be using for γ = 1. If the implied discount rate is higher than the borrowing rate for the marginal dollar, then consumers are inattentive energy costs. 1 In other words, demand for homes with high fuel costs is too high relative to what would be optimal.The choice to sell or buy a home in any given year is driven by exogenous events such as changes in employment or changes in family composition. All potential home buyers in geographic area a in year t have the same income and face the same choice set of homes, 1 The word "inattentive" means that consumers are undervaluing a dollar spent on future energy costs relative to a dollar spent in upfront price. This "mistake" might arise through several potential mechanisms such as imperfect information, biased beliefs, present bias, or bias toward concentration. 0

No abstract

Auction, Emissions allowances, Grandfathering, C91, D44,