Understanding the price dynamics of a real market using simulations: the Dutch auction of the Pescara wholesale fish market

This paper aims to contribute towards the literature on artificial market modeling of real estate markets. Having the possibility to observe the Pescara wholesale fish market, we build an agent based simulation model to find out which buyers’ behavior is able to replicate its price dynamics. The present work differentiates itself from other works on perishable products because the market under investigation has a centralized structure organized as a Dutch auction instead of being based on bilateral trading. From this point of view the paper also contributes to understand the anomalies of price dynamics highlighted by the empirical papers on sequential auctions for art, wine and jewelry.