IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/oxecpp/v59y2007i1p1-15.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

On organizing a sequential auction: results from a natural experiment by Christie's

Author

Listed:
  • Victor Ginsburgh
  • Jan C. van Ours

Abstract

In empirical studies of sequential auctions of identical objects prices have been found to decline. We study three ascending price auctions of ancient Chinese porcelain recovered from shipwrecks, in which there are very long sequences of lots containing the same number of identical objects. In the three auctions different setups were used. We exploit these 'natural experiments' to examine whether some sequences generate more revenue than others. Our results point to the fact that a sequence of lots each of which contains the same numbers of items generates more revenue than lots with varying numbers of items. We also find that over a sequence of lots hammer prices decline and converge to some limit value, which is larger than the pre-sale estimate in the first two sales, and is equal to the pre-sale estimate in the third one. Copyright 2007, Oxford University Press.

Suggested Citation

  • Victor Ginsburgh & Jan C. van Ours, 2007. "On organizing a sequential auction: results from a natural experiment by Christie's," Oxford Economic Papers, Oxford University Press, vol. 59(1), pages 1-15, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:oxecpp:v:59:y:2007:i:1:p:1-15
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/oep/gpl032
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or search for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. David Pardoe & Peter Stone & Maytal Saar-Tsechansky & Tayfun Keskin & Kerem Tomak, 2010. "Adaptive Auction Mechanism Design and the Incorporation of Prior Knowledge," INFORMS Journal on Computing, INFORMS, vol. 22(3), pages 353-370, August.
    2. Dakshina Garfield De Silva & Marina Gertsberg & Georgia Kosmopoulou & Rachel Pownall, 2017. "Dealer Networks in the World of Art," Working Papers 198144199, Lancaster University Management School, Economics Department.
    3. Boudreau, James W. & Shunda, Nicholas, 2016. "Sequential auctions with budget constraints: Evidence from fantasy basketball auction drafts," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 62(C), pages 8-22.
    4. De Silva, Dakshina G. & Gertsberg, Marina & Kosmopoulou, Georgia & Pownall, Rachel A.J., 2022. "Evolution of a dealer trading network and its effects on art auction prices," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 144(C).
    5. Paulo B. Goes & Gilbert G. Karuga & Arvind K. Tripathi, 2010. "Understanding Willingness-to-Pay Formation of Repeat Bidders in Sequential Online Auctions," Information Systems Research, INFORMS, vol. 21(4), pages 907-924, December.
    6. Sofia Izquierdo Sanchez & Maria Navarro Paniagua, 2017. "Hollywood’s Wage Structure and Discrimination," Working Papers 152465718, Lancaster University Management School, Economics Department.
    7. Yunhan Li & J. Scott Shonkwiler, 2021. "Assessing the Role of Ordering in Sequential English Auctions – Evidence from the Online Western Video Market Auction," American Journal of Agricultural Economics, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 103(1), pages 90-105, January.
    8. Vishnu V. Narayan & Enguerrand Prebet & Adrian Vetta, 2019. "The Declining Price Anomaly is not Universal in Multi-Buyer Sequential Auctions (but almost is)," Papers 1905.00853, arXiv.org.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:oxecpp:v:59:y:2007:i:1:p:1-15. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/oep .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.