How Auctions Work for Wine and Art

interview auctioneers, and even to buy a little wine.' In the meantime I have also had the opportunity (with John Abowd, 1988) to observe and collect data on the auction sale of impressionist and contemporary paintings. This paper reports on some of the empirical regularities that I and others have observed in the actual operation of the auction markets for these items. In view of the rich and diverse array of theoretical literature on auctions it seems high time economists began to spell out precisely what facts it is meant to explain.2