IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/iuk/wpaper/2010-16.html

The Herodotus Paradox

Author

Listed:
  • Michael R. Baye

    (Department of Business Economics and Public Policy, Indiana University Kelley School of Business)

  • Dan Kovenock

    (Department of Economics, Tippie College of Business, University of Iowa)

  • Casper G. de Vries

    (Tinbergen Institute and Erasmus University Rotterdam)

Abstract

The Babylonian bridal auction, described by Herodotus, is regarded as one of the earliest uses of an auction in history. Yet, to our knowledge, the literature lacks a formal equilibrium analysis of this auction. We provide such an analysis for the two-player case with complete and incomplete information, and in so doing identify what we call the “Herodotus Paradox.”

Suggested Citation

  • Michael R. Baye & Dan Kovenock & Casper G. de Vries, 2010. "The Herodotus Paradox," Working Papers 2010-16, Indiana University, Kelley School of Business, Department of Business Economics and Public Policy.
    • Handle: RePEc:iuk:wpaper:2010-16
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://kelley.iu.edu/riharbau/RePEc/iuk/wpaper/bepp2010-16-baye-kovenock-devries.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Blog mentions

    As found by EconAcademics.org, the blog aggregator for Economics research:
    1. An analysis of the oldest auction in history
      by Economic Logician in Economic Logic on 2011-01-05 21:52:00

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Ispano, Alessandro, 2015. "A note on the equilibria of the unbounded traveler’s dilemma," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 77(C), pages 52-54.
    2. Baye, Michael R. & Kovenock, Dan & de Vries, Casper G., 2012. "The Herodotus paradox," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 74(1), pages 399-406.
    3. Kaplan, Todd R. & Zamir, Shmuel, 2015. "Advances in Auctions," Handbook of Game Theory with Economic Applications,, Elsevier.
    4. Fey, Mark, 2024. "An undecidable statement regarding zero-sum games," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 145(C), pages 19-26.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • C72 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory - - - Noncooperative Games
    • D44 - Microeconomics - - Market Structure, Pricing, and Design - - - Auctions
    • L0 - Industrial Organization - - General

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Lists

    This item is featured on the following reading lists, Wikipedia, or ReplicationWiki pages:
    1. Economic Logic blog

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:iuk:wpaper:2010-16. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Rick Harbaugh (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/dpiubus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.