A Laboratory Study of Customer Markets

经济理论家把注意力集中在拍卖市场上，在拍卖市场上，买家和卖家只关心价格，而不关心他们从谁那里买或卖给谁。现代世界中大多数重要的市场不是拍卖市场，而是“客户市场”，在这种市场中，个体买家与个体卖家形成长期依附关系，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和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。该项目是根据不可逆投资理论对客户市场进行系统的实验室研究。人类实验对象将被招募到受控的实验室市场中充当买卖双方，并将保留他们的利润，估计平均每小时约为15-20美元。因此，他们有严肃的经济动机。在实验室市场上，每当买家决定寻找新的卖家时，他们都会产生转换成本。开关成本设置在零，低和高值在不同的实验室会议。买方的诱导价值和卖方的诱导成本遵循随机游走，每个周期冲击的振幅在不同的会议中设置为零和中等值。在最初的一系列实验中，卖家公布价格，买家选择卖家。随后的交易使用了其他市场机制（议价和密封竞价的形式）、其他信息条件和相关冲击。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投资理论的工作进行分析。本课题具有实践意义和理论意义。这项工作将促使不可逆投资理论更严格地应用于客户市场，并将提高对工业组织（I/O）中的价格分散和其他问题的理解。实验数据和I/O理论将提高对缓慢（或“粘性”）价格调整的理解，这是宏观经济学的一个核心问题。最终，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.