Collusion in auctions for emission permits: An experimental analysis

Dallas Burtraw, Jacob Goeree, Charles Holt, Erica Myers, Karen Palmer and William Shobe

Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 2009, vol. 28, issue 4, 672-691

Abstract: 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.

Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (42)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1002/pam.20460 Link to full text; subscription required (text/html)

Related works:
Working Paper: Collusion in Auctions for Emission Permits: An Experimental Analysis (2008)
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:wly:jpamgt:v:28:y:2009:i:4:p:672-691

DOI: 10.1002/pam.20460

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Policy Analysis and Management from John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().