Final Exam Credit Instructions

Final Exam Credit Instructions Spring 2015 You may read the following papers and submit your written reports on them in order to improve your exam score, as explained in our course syllabus. Completing this work may improve your exam score, but cannot raise your grade on attendance, homework, the project, or other exams. Note that if you turn in only one of these reading summaries, it must be the rst one listed; if you turn in two, they must be the rst and second, etc. (You cannot pick and choose between them.) For each paper, you are provided with a list of questions. The rst question species which parts of the paper you are expected to read, and asks for a general summary. I imagine that an adequate summary will take approximately one half to one full typed, single-spaced page of text1. In addition to summarizing the reading in your own words, you should answer each of the other questions { depending on the question, a complete answer may take a sentence or a full paragraph. If you feel unsure about whether you understand a question or whether your answers are complete, you should feel free to talk to me about it. The due date is Wednesday, May 20, at 5 pm for all summaries. 1. \What Really Matters in Auction Design" Paul Klemperer, Journal of Economic Per- spectives, 2002. (a) Read the entire paper, and write your own summary. (b) List some drawbacks and some advantages of ascending auctions, from a practical auction design perspective. (c) List some drawbacks and some advantages of sealed-bid auctions, from a practical auction design perspective. (d) Describe the Anglo-Dutch auction rules. (e) In what circumstances will the design of an auction be less important? 2. \Field Experiments on the Eects of Reserve Prices in Auctions: More Magic on the Internet" David Reiley, RAND Journal of Economics, Spring 2006, vol. 37, no. 1, pp. 195-211. (a) Read the entire paper and write your own summary. (b) What question(s) was the experiment designed to answer? (c) Describe the set-up of the experiment - the number of treatments, the auction rules and other procedures, etc. (d) What is a variable that could not be controlled in this experiment? 1I am not particular about the format, but if you are looking for formatting guidelines then I suggest 1 inch margins and 12 point font. The summary will be judged on whether it re ects a thorough understanding of the paper, not on whether it lls up a page (e) Explain the meaning of the \Cloister" price to which the article refers. Why did this value matter? (f) Describe the conclusions regarding the eect of reserve prices on the probability of sale, on auction revenue, and on bidder strategy. Identify whether the experiment results support theoretical predictions. 3. \Running Up the Bid: Detecting, Predicting, and Preventing Reserve Price Shilling in Online Auctions" John H. Kagel and Dan Levin, The Economic Journal, 103 (July 1993), 868-879. (a) Read pages 1-21 and pages 31-34, and write your own summary. (b) Explain why online auctions might be especially prone to seller fraud such as shill bidding. (c) Dene the two types of shilling mentioned in the article. (d) List the reasons that sellers using online auction houses might be tempted to shill bid. (e) Explain the reasoning behind the study's ve research hypotheses. (f) Explain the limitations of this study.