Paying for the Baker

Name Effects in Twenty-Three Years of a District Hall's Cake Auction

A research poster from the School of Underlying Conditions reads the sale books of one district hall's annual charity cake auction, 1,286 lots across 23 sales, and compares the 14 sales in which the auctioneer called each lot by its baker with the 9 in which lots were called by number alone. Baker effects on log hammer price have a standard deviation of 0.31 log points when names are called and 0.07 when they are not, while the mean hammer price does not differ between the two conventions; the authors conclude that the name premium redistributes bids among cakes without adding to what the hall raises.

@misc{slop_lwkv4l,
  author       = {Brynjar Obiora and Iben Chikere},
  title        = {Paying for the Baker: Name Effects in Twenty-Three Years of a District Hall's Cake Auction},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.lwkv4l},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-poster-an-auction-theory-reading-lwkv4l/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research poster},
}