Shill bidding in English auctions is the use of insincere bids on the seller’s behalf to artificially drive up the price of the listing. Shilling is illegal and has become a serious problem in online auctions because it is easy for the seller to bid under false names and hence self-collude. We show that in an independent private-value (IPV) English auction where there are heterogeneous bidders ...

This product is part of the RAND Institute for Civil Justice working paper series. RAND working papers are intended to share researchers’ latest findings and to solicit informal peer review. They have been approved for circulation by the RAND Institute for Civil Justice but have not been formally edited or peer reviewed. Unless otherwise indicated, working papers can be quoted and cited without...

This paper investigates a puzzle and possible policy concern: Why do platforms such as eBay and Visa that enable the trade of goods of different unobserved costs and valuations rely predominantly on linear ad-valorem fees, that is, fees that increase in proportion to the sale price of the trades that they enable? Under a broad class of demand functions, we show that a linear ad-valorem fee sche...

In 2007 the Association of Research-Based Pharmaceutical Companies (vfa) published recommendations to improve the quality and transparency of non-interventional studies. These recommendations include quality assurance measures, in particular with respect to transparency as well as for the verification of the data collected in these studies. This publication presents the results of a survey on f...

Shill bidding has increased substantially with the explosion in the number of online auctions. For English auctions with conventional intermediation fee schedules and a continuous increment of the bid, sellers may profit from shill bidding, which is illegal. To deter shill bidding, Wang et al.31 designed a mechanism — the shill-deterrent fee schedule (SDFS) which makes shill bidding unprofitabl...

A so-called "incentive contract" is a linear payment schedule, where the buyer pays a fixed fee plus some proportion of audited project cost. That remaining proportion of project cost borne by the seller is called the "sharing ratio." A higher sharing ratio creates more incentive to reduce costs. But it also makes the agent bear more cost uncertainty, requiring as compensation a greater fixed f...

In 1961, a new and mandatory National Health Insurance plan was enacted in Japan. This healthcare system has succeeded in providing universal coverage while also containing the growth of national medical expenditures (NME) to the rate of growth of the gross national product (GNP), namely, approximately 4-5% annually, for several decades. All Japanese medical procedures, including dental procedu...