Transaction Costs, Participation, and the Cost-Effectiveness of Reverse Auctions: Evidence from a Laboratory Experiment
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Reverse auctions are often recognized as a tool that can cost-effectively allocate agri-environmental program funds to support environmentally-beneficial land management practices. However, transaction costs can limit participation in auctions which limits their cost-effectiveness. We use a laboratory experiment to examine how various levels of transaction costs influence participation and bidding behavior in discriminatory-price reverse auctions in low and high budget scenarios. Our experimental results show that transaction costs limit auction participation, increase bid amounts, and reduce cost-effectiveness. The negative effect of transaction costs on participation is particularly large when the budget level is low. Using the results of our experiment, we design a simulation to investigate whether reducing transaction costs via subsidies could increase program cost-effectiveness under various conditions. We find that transaction cost subsidies increase auction cost-effectiveness; however, our study raises new questions about how these subsidies are designed and the implications for the overall costs and benefits of efforts to reduce transaction costs in reverse auctions.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it