Art Auctions & LaTeX
I took a game theory class last fall, which opened my eyes to the complexity and value of auctions to elicit the preferences of buyers and sellers. As a continuation to my blog post last week about the art world, I found this paper by Kathryn Graddy and Orley Ashenfelter who apply game theory and economic theory to art auctions in a nontechnical way. I hope you'll find it interesting: http://people.brandeis.edu/~kgraddy/published%20papers/DP13665.pdf
Also, in order to fulfill the artistic component of the blog posts, I will comment on the formatting of the paper. This is very different from other economics papers, mainly because it is meant to be published as a chapter to a book. The publisher of the book takes raw manuscripts of chapters and formats them to fit the design requirements of the publisher. However, most publications that publish papers in journals rely on good formatting on the part of the economist because there is a very distinctive look produced by TeX or more commonly LaTeX, a language that helps economists and many other scientists type mathematical formulas and notation.
Ever since I learned about LaTeX, I have used it for many of my projects, e.g., my essays, homework assignments, and even my CV. Most TeX editors are not WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get). This is in sharp contrast to Microsoft Word - if you change the font of the entire document, you will see the text change. In TeX, you deal with a raw text editor so you don't see formatting changes in real time. Instead, you use commands to change the formatting and then separately compile the document to see what the resulting output is. The reason I prefer this workflow is that it helps me focus on the content before the formatting.
To compare the look of the paper I linked above to a paper written in LaTeX, take a look at this paper: http://people.brandeis.edu/~kgraddy/published%20papers/BeggsAGraddyKAER2009.pdf
Also written by Kathryn Graddy, this paper has a leaner look in my opinion. Perhaps the strongest reason why is the use of a font known as Computer Modern, developed for the TeX suite to facilitate mathematical typesetting.
Also, in order to fulfill the artistic component of the blog posts, I will comment on the formatting of the paper. This is very different from other economics papers, mainly because it is meant to be published as a chapter to a book. The publisher of the book takes raw manuscripts of chapters and formats them to fit the design requirements of the publisher. However, most publications that publish papers in journals rely on good formatting on the part of the economist because there is a very distinctive look produced by TeX or more commonly LaTeX, a language that helps economists and many other scientists type mathematical formulas and notation.
Ever since I learned about LaTeX, I have used it for many of my projects, e.g., my essays, homework assignments, and even my CV. Most TeX editors are not WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get). This is in sharp contrast to Microsoft Word - if you change the font of the entire document, you will see the text change. In TeX, you deal with a raw text editor so you don't see formatting changes in real time. Instead, you use commands to change the formatting and then separately compile the document to see what the resulting output is. The reason I prefer this workflow is that it helps me focus on the content before the formatting.
To compare the look of the paper I linked above to a paper written in LaTeX, take a look at this paper: http://people.brandeis.edu/~kgraddy/published%20papers/BeggsAGraddyKAER2009.pdf
Also written by Kathryn Graddy, this paper has a leaner look in my opinion. Perhaps the strongest reason why is the use of a font known as Computer Modern, developed for the TeX suite to facilitate mathematical typesetting.
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