A Laboratory Study of Customer Markets

经济理论家们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东西或卖给谁。 现代世界的大多数重要市场都不是拍卖市场，而是“顾客市场”，在这种市场中，由于寻找令人满意的新交易伙伴的成本很高，个别买方与个别卖方形成长期联系。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。 该项目是一个系统的实验室研究客户市场的不可逆投资理论。人类受试者将被招募在受控的实验室市场中充当买家和卖家，并将保留他们的利润，估计平均每小时约15 -20美元。因此，他们有很强的经济动机。实验室市场中的买方在决定寻找新的卖方时会产生转换成本。在不同的实验室会话中，切换成本被设置为零、低和高值。 买方的诱导价值和卖方的诱导成本遵循随机游走，每周期的冲击幅度设置为零，并在不同的会议在一个中等的值。 在最初的一系列实验中，卖家公布价格，买家选择卖家。随后的交易会使用其他市场制度（讨价还价和密封投标的形式）、其他信息条件和相关冲击。 实验室数据将根据公平规范和寡头垄断模型以及不可逆投资理论的出版工作进行分析。 该项目的意义既有现实意义，又有理论意义。 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，并将提高对价格分散和产业组织（I/O）中其他问题的理解。实验室数据和I/O理论将提高对缓慢（或“粘性”）价格调整的理解，这是宏观经济学的一个中心问题。最终，更好的货币和财政政策以及更好的监管做法将产生于对客户市场业绩特征的更好理解。

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.