TY  - JOUR
AU  - Athey,Susan
AU  - Haile,Philip A.
TI  - Empirical Models of Auctions
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 12126
PY  - 2006
Y2  - March 2006
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12126
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12126.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Susan Athey
Department of Economics
Harvard University
1875 Cambridge St.
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel: 650/725-8696
Fax: 650/725-5702
E-Mail: athey@fas.harvard.edu

Philip Haile
Department of Economics
Yale University
37 Hillhouse Avenue
P.O. Box 208264
New Haven, CT  06520
Tel: 203/432-3568
Fax: 203/432-6323
E-Mail: philip.haile@yale.edu
M2  - featured in NBER digest on 2006-03-27
AB  - Many important economic questions arising in auctions can be answered only with knowledge of the underlying primitive distributions governing bidder demand and information.  An active literature has developed aiming to estimate these primitives by exploiting restrictions from economic theory as part of the econometric model used to interpret auction data.  We review some highlights of this recent literature, focusing on identification and empirical applications.  We describe three insights that underlie much of the recent methodological progress in this area and discuss some of the ways these insights have been extended to richer models allowing more convincing empirical applications.  We discuss several recent empirical studies using these methods to address a range of important economic questions.
ER  -