Economists, psychologists, and marketers are interested in determining the monetary value people place on non-market goods for a variety of reasons: to carry out cost-benefit analysis, to determine the welfare effects of technological innovation or public policy, to forecast new product success, and to understand individual and consumer behavior. Unfortunately, many currently available techniques for eliciting individuals' values suffer from a serious problem in that they involve asking individuals hypothetical questions about intended behavior. Experimental auctions circumvent this problem because they involve individuals exchanging real money for real goods in an active market. This represents a promising means for eliciting non-market values. Lusk and Shogren provide a comprehensive guide to the theory and practice of experimental auctions. It will be a valuable resource to graduate students, practitioners and researchers concerned with the design and utilization of experimental auctions in applied economic and marketing research.

In auctions, bidders compete with one another in their attempt to 1 purchase the goods that are up for sale • But buyer competition may be reduced or disappear when a ring of colluding bidders is present. The purpose of the participants to a ring is to eliminate buyer competition and to realize a gain over vendors. When all participants are members of the ring, this is done by purchasing the item at the reserve price and splitting the spoils (the difference between the item market value and the reserve price) among the participants. "The term ring apparently derives from the fact that in a settlement sale following the auction, members of the collusive arrangement form a circle or ring to facilitate observation of their trading behavior by the ring leader" (Cassady jr. (1967)). If the coalition members knew other players' values, the problem faced by the ring might be easily solved: the player with the highest value should submit a serious bid and the other members, on the contrary, only phony bids. However, ring participants do not usually know the values of other members. Therefore, ring members have to find out some mechanism which selects the player who has to bid seriously and, eventually, esta blish side payments paid to each of the losers2.

Volume II & III of Experimental Business Research include original papers that were presented at the Second Asian Conference on Experimental Business Research held at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) on December 16-19, 2003. The conference was organized by the Center for Experimental Business Research (cEBR) at HKUST and was chaired by Professors Amnon Rapoport and Rami Zwick. Experimental Business Research adopts laboratory based experimental economics methods to study an array of business and policy issues spanning the entire business domain including accounting, economics, finance, information systems, marketing and management and policy. "Experimental economics" is an established term that refers to the use of controlled laboratory-based procedures to test the implications of economic hypotheses and models and discover replicable patterns of economic behavior. We have coined the term "Experimental Business Research" in order to broaden the scope of"experimental economics" to encompass experimental finance, experimental accounting, and more generally the use of laboratory-based procedures to test hypotheses and models arising from research in other business related areas, including information systems, marketing, and management and policy. The chapters included in these volumes reflect the domain diversity of studies in the experimental business research field.

This book presents two experimental studies that deal with the comparison of multi-item auction designs for two specific applications: the sale of 2.6 GHz radio spectrum rights in Europe, and the sale of emissions permits in Australia. In order to tackle the complexity of these experiments, a cognitively based toolkit is proposed, including modularized video instructions, comprehension tests, a learning platform, a graphical one-screen user interface, and comprehension-based group matching.

Comprised of 10 surveys by leading scholars, this collection showcases the largest and fastest growing strands of research on market behaviour in experimental economics. Covers topics such as asset markets, contests, environmental policy, frictions, general equilibrium, labour markets, multi-unit auctions, oligopoly markets, and prediction markets Focuses on the literature that has helped economists best understand how markets operate Assesses the impact of developments in theory, policy, and research methods