Auctioning Exhibition Spaces

A Field Experiment at the VfS Annual Conference 2001

Abstract

All physical displays used for exhibitions by publishers and research institutes during the Annual Congress 2001 of the Verein für Socialpolitik (leading association of German speaking economists) were auctioned off. The paper considers the motivation for this field experiment, describes the employed auction design, and summarizes its outcome. In addition, the paper attempts to quantify the degree of efficiency of the implemented allocation and compares it with feasible alternative allocations and evaluates the auction outcome with the results obtained from the exhibition at the preceding Annual Congress 2000.