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Ned Augenblick
Job Market Candidate
Stanford University
Department of Economics
579 Serra Mall
Stanford, CA 94305
650-804-5281
ned789@stanford.edu
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Research
Consumer and Producer Behavior in the Market for Penny Auctions: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis
(Job Market Paper)
I investigate a new auction mechanism in which a bid costs a small amount and
every bid must be a small increment above the current high bid.
First, I describe the set of equilibrium hazard functions over winning bids
and identify a unique function with desirable conditions.
Second, I examine bidder behavior using two datasets of 166,000
auctions and 13 million individual bids, captured with a real-time
collection algorithm from a company called Swoopo. I find that players
overbid significantly in aggregate, yielding average revenues of 150%
of the good's value and generating profits of €18 million over four years.
While the empirical hazard rate is close to the predicted hazard rate at the beginning of the auction,
it deviates as the auction progresses, matching the predictions of my model when agents exhibit a sunk cost fallacy.
I show that these losses are mitigated by experience. Finally, I estimate both the current and optimal supply rules
for Swoopo using high frequency data, demonstrating that the company achieves nearly 99% of potential profit.
The analysis suggests that over-supplying auctions in order to attract a larger userbase is costly in the short run,
creating a large structural barrier to entrants. I support this conclusion with auction-level data from five competitors,
which establishes that entrants collect relatively small or negative daily profits.
Choice Fatigue: The Effect of Making Previous Choices on Decision Making in a Voting Context
(with Scott Nicholson)
This paper addresses the impact of making multiple previous decisions on decision making,
which we call "choice fatigue." We exploit a natural experiment in which different voters in
San Diego County are presented with the same contest decision at different points
on the ballot, providing variation in the number of previous decisions made by the voters.
We find that increasing the position of a contest on the ballot increases the tendancy to abstain
and to rely on decision shortcuts, such as voting for the status-quo or the first candidate listed
in a contest. Our estimates suggest that if an average contest was placed at the top of the ballot
(when voters are "fresh"), abstentions would decrease by 10%, the percentage of "no" votes on
propositions (a vote for the status-quo) would fall by 2.9 percentage points, and the percentage
of votes for the first candidate would fall by .5 percentage points. Interestingly, if this occured,
our results suggests that 22 (6.25%) of the 352 propositions in our dataset would have passed rather
than failed. Implications of the results range from the dissemination of information by firms and
policy makers to the design of electoral institutions and the strategic use of ballot propositions.
Using Competition to Elicit Cooperation in a Political Public Goods Game: A Field Experiment
(with Jesse Cunha)
This paper presents evidence from a field experiment on the impact of inter-group competition
on intra-group contributions to a public good. We sent political solicitations to
potential donors to a congressional campaign that contained either information about
the past donations of those in the same party (cooperative treatment), those in the
competing party (competition treatment), or no reference (the control group).
The competitive and cooperative treatment groups contributed at a rate 85% and
42% above that of the control, respectively. Furthermore, while the cooperative
treatment induced more contributions concentrated near the mentioned reference point,
the competitive treatment induced more contributions at nearly twice the level of the
given reference point, leading to a higher total contributed amount. This suggests that
appealing to competitive motivations can be more profitable than eliciting "pro-social"
motives in certain fundraising situations.
Bad Associations: Protecting Trademarks from Dilution
The economic analysis of packaging law is driven largely by the view that packaging
provides consumers with credible information about the attributes and origin of goods.
However, multiple empirical observations and trends in current trademark law suggest
that the nature of packaging is more complex. In this paper, I develop a theoretical
decision model that concisely explains these observations and makes a variety of novel
predictions. The model provides an economic basis for the use of "anti-dilution" laws,
which very broadly protect the cues of a firm's trademark. Interestingly, the model
suggests that nature's cues can be “diluted” if copied by lower-quality firms, providing
justification for anti-dilution protection for nature's cues. Finally, the model
suggests that a lack of protection for firms can lead to "fashion cycles," in which
one firm copies the cues of another firm, leading the original firm to use new cues,
which are then copied, and so on.
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Teaching
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