Auctions!

More evidence that auctions are important and deserve a place in the economics curriculum: the NY Times says that billions of dollars of loans linked to troubled real estate assets are being auctioned off on the web.

PS. I just did a fun gig in at the University of Arizona---thanks to Brittany and the Economics Society for bringing me to campus!---and got to meet the club's faculty sponsor, David Reiley, who works on... auctions. Here's the super-cool paper on revenue equivalence from his dissertation that got published in the AER (85:1063-1080, 1995). For the past two years David has been on leave from U of A, doing work at Yahoo! Research to "measure the effects of display advertising on advertisers’ sales."