Agent's behaviour in a sequential Dutch auction: evidence from the Pescara wholesale fish market

Abstract

In this article we perform an empirical investigation to detect whether and to what extent agents' behaviour departs from those foreseen by the orthodox economic theory in the Pescara wholesale fish market, which has a centralized structure. Using non-parametric techniques and tools from statistical physics, we tackle the issue investigating features such as the dynamics of the structure of attendance in auctions, the varieties of fish presentation during the seller's turn and the presence of long-term relationships between buyers and sellers. We follow this way instead of focusing on the price dispersion and dynamics to avoid risking that the unobserved quality differences of the traded products might bias the results of the analysis.

Notes

¹Pescara is a medium size Italian city situated approximately in the middle of the Italian East coast.

²The change of the weekly auctions schedule was decided by sellers who consequently had time to evaluate how to react to this variation.

³Indeed, the standard problem leading to the Maxwell–Boltzmann statistic has the additional constraint that the system must have a fixed energy. Aoki (1996, p. 17) has the precise solution with the only constraint on the number of trials.