rationality, irrationality and escalating behavior in lowest unique bid auctions理性、非理性和独特的最低投标拍卖行为升级.pdfVIP

Rationality, Irrationality and Escalating Behavior in Lowest Unique Bid Auctions 1,2,3 4 ´ 1,2,5 Filippo Radicchi , Andrea Baronchelli , Luıs A. N. Amaral * 1 Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, United States of America, 2 Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, United States of America, 3 Departament d’Enginyeria Quimica, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Catalunya, Spain, ´ ` 4 Departament de Fısica i Enginyeria Nuclear, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Campus Nord B4, Barcelona, Spain, 5 Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO), Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, United States of America Abstract Information technology has revolutionized the traditional structure of markets. The removal of geographical and time constraints has fostered the growth of online auction markets, which now include millions of economic agents worldwide and annual transaction volumes in the billions of dollars. Here, we analyze bid histories of a little studied type of online auctions – lowest unique bid auctions. Similarly to what has been reported for foraging animals searching for scarce food, ´ ´ we find that agents adopt Levy flight search strategies in their exploration of ‘‘bid space’’. The Levy regime, which is characterized by a power-law decaying probability distribution of step lengths, holds over nearly thr