Candidate for the best first paragraph of an economics paper, from a paper on round numbers in auctions by Adriaan Soetevent:
In perhaps the most notorious auction in history, after murdering the emperor in 193 CE, praetorian soldiers offered the entire Roman Empire to the highest bidder. Commentators since Klemperer and Temin (2001) have found Julianus' winning bid of 25,000 sesterces per soldier remarkable for various reasons: its sheer size (exceeding one billion current dollars), its enormous jump over the previous bid (20,000 offered by Sulpicianus), and its ultimate futility (Julianus only reigned as emperor for two months before being murdered himself). What has gone unremarked is that both Sulpicianus' and Julianus' bids are round numbers.
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