TY - JOUR A1 - Traxler, Christian A1 - Trautmann, Stefan T1 - Reserve Prices as Reference Points : Evidence from Auctions for Football Players at Hattrick.org JF - Journal of Economic Psychology N2 - We study the impact of sellers’ reserve prices on transfer prices in online auctions of virtual football players at Hattrick.org. We introduce an empirical model that distinguishes between two separate effects from public reserve prices: (1) a mechanical effect, which is driven by the design of the English auction and (2) a psychological reference-dependence effect through reserve prices serving as reference points. The psychological effect has recently been introduced in behavioral models of situations where agents are uncertain about their own willingness-to-pay, while the mechanical effect is well captured by standard auction theory. Controlling for censoring when players are not sold, both effects are observed. Once we account for the potential endogeneity of reserve prices, however, we do not find evidence for reference dependence in Hattrick auctions. KW - Reserve prices KW - Reference dependence KW - Auctions KW - Online games Y1 - 2010 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-21619 SN - 0167-4870 N1 - This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Journal of Economic Psychology. The final authenticated version is available online at: DOI 10.1016/j.joep.2009.08.004 VL - 31 IS - 2 SP - 230 EP - 240 ER -