A Laboratory Study of Customer Markets

经济理论家们将注意力集中在拍卖市场上，在这个市场上，买家和卖家只关心价格，而不关心他们从谁那里购买或出售给谁。现代世界中的大多数重要市场都不是拍卖市场，而是“客户市场”，在这里，个人买家与个人卖家形成长期的依恋关系，因为寻找令人满意的新交易伙伴的成本很高。客户市场包括大多数现代劳动力市场以及许多零售和批发市场。不可逆投资理论的最新发展为客户市场提供了新的见解。该项目是在不可逆转投资理论的指导下对客户市场进行的系统实验室研究。受试者将被招募为受控实验室市场的买家和卖家，并将保留他们的利润，估计平均每小时约为15至20美元。因此，他们有严重的财务动机。实验室市场的买家每当决定寻找新的卖家时，都会产生转换成本。在不同的实验会话中，交换机成本设置为零、低值和高值。买家的诱导值和卖家的诱致成本遵循随机游走，在不同的时段，每个周期的冲击幅度分别设置为零和适中的值。在最初的一系列实验室会议中，卖家公布价格，买家选择卖家。随后的交易使用其他市场机构(讨价还价和密封竞价的形式)、其他信息条件和相关的冲击。实验室数据将根据已发表的关于公平规范和寡头垄断模型以及不可逆转投资理论的工作进行分析。本课题的研究具有重要的现实意义和理论意义。这项工作将促进不可逆投资理论在客户市场中更严格的应用，并将提高对价格离散性和产业组织(I/O)中其他问题的理解。实验室数据和I/O理论将提高对价格调整迟滞(或“粘滞”)的理解，这是宏观经济学中的一个核心问题。归根结底，更好的货币和财政政策以及更好的监管实践将源于对客户市场表现特征的更好理解。

Economic theorists have focused attention on auction markets in which buyers and sellers care only about price and don't care about who they buy from or sell to. Most of the important markets in the modern world are not auction markets, but rather are `customer markets` in which individual buyers form long-term attachments to individual sellers because it is costly to find satisfactory new transaction partners. Customer markets include most modern labor markets and many retail and wholesale markets. Recent development of irreversible investment theory offers new insight into customer markets. The project is a systematic laboratory study of customer markets informed by irreversible investment theory. Human subjects will be recruited to act as buyers and sellers in controlled laboratory markets and will keep their profits, estimated to average about $15-20 per hour. Hence they have serious financial motivation. Buyers in the laboratory markets incur a switch cost whenever they decide to seek a new seller. The switch cost is set at zero, low and high values in different laboratory sessions. Buyers' induced values and sellers' induced costs follow a random walk with the amplitude of per-period shocks set at zero and at a moderate value in different sessions. In the initial series of laboratory sessions, sellers post prices and buyers choose the seller. Later sessions use other market institutions (forms of haggling and sealed bidding), other information conditions, and correlated shocks. The laboratory data will be analyzed in light of published work on fairness norms and oligopoly models as well as irreversible investment theory. The significance of the project is practical as well as theoretic. The work will spur more rigorous application of irreversible investment theory to customer markets and will improve understanding of price dispersion and other issues in industrial organization (I/O). The laboratory data and I/O theory will improve understanding of sluggish (or `sticky`) price adjustment, a central issue in macroeconomics. Ultimately better monetary and fiscal policy and better regulatory practice will result from improved understanding of the performance characteristics of customer markets.