Avoidable Cost: Ride a Double Auction Roller Coaster

Mark Van Boening and Nathaniel Wilcox

American Economic Review, 1996, vol. 86, issue 3, 461-77

Abstract: The double auction trading institution has been highly efficient across diverse marginal-cost market structures, whether human subjects or 'zero-intelligence' robots populated those markets. Accordingly, many researchers suspect that double auction performance transcends market structure and agent strategy. But the authors show that large avoidable costs undermine the efficiency and stability of human subject double auctions and these low human efficiencies are simultaneously well above zero-intelligence efficiencies. Their results dramatically illustrate the potential havoc wrought by highly competitive institutions when they must cope with nonconvex technologies. Copyright 1996 by American Economic Association.

Date: 1996
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (36)

Downloads: (external link)
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-8282%2819960 ... O%3B2-T&origin=repec full text (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to JSTOR subscribers. See http://www.jstor.org for details.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:aea:aecrev:v:86:y:1996:i:3:p:461-77

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.aeaweb.org/journals/subscriptions

Access Statistics for this article

American Economic Review is currently edited by Esther Duflo

More articles in American Economic Review from American Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Michael P. Albert ().