My wife and I played the two player version of Puerto Rico yesterday. Playing that game makes me happy for the rest of the day at the very least. And that's only when I'm losing - of course, I have won so many games in a row now that I'm amazed anyone will play with me :-)
But I have been looking on other german games, and the ones that really appeal to me are those that have some interesting economic element. In particular, Morgenland (which is called Aladdin's dragons in english) has a blind bidding mechanic that really intrigues me, and of course there's Reiner Knizia's Merchants of Amsterdam, which is based on the dutch auction.
The dutch auction suprised me when I first heard of it. An auction where the price ticks steadily down, and the winner is the first to take the bid - how utterly, well, cool! When I read about auctions on the net I can understand why being an economist might be interesting.
But there's one auction form that I'm sure exists, which I would like to know more about (where it has been used, etc).
When I read in Andrew Odlyzko's classic "Privacy, economics, and price discrimination on the Internet" (which I found via Wendy Seltzer a long time ago), I was particularly intrigued by the discussion of the article writer.
There's this guy who offers to write an article, and he has two customers, but the first is only willing to pay 600 and the other 1000. The writer won't take the time if he gets less than 1500. Unless he charges the one more than the other, the article won't get written.
That's OK, of course, it's just that to me the non-economist this seems like a great area for a sort of auction with commitments. Let all interested parties give a bid, if the sum is acceptable to the author, he publishes the article and takes all the commited money. If he doesn't, the bidders get their commitments back, of course. Now we can vary this basic concept (does the author publicise how much he needs to publish? How much is already entered? Is there a minimum bid size? How long does a commitment/bid last?), but it seems to me to be a great way to finance the kind of public or semi-public things like research articles, art displays, news, software etc.
The more uncertain people are what others will bid, the better off they are at offering what they genuinely are willing to pay. I'm not sure if this would work in practice, or if there's a game-theoretic reason why the article rarely gets written or something, but it would have been very cool to see this in action somewhere.
Posted by vintermann at April 12, 2005 07:16 PM