An auction is externality-robust if unilateral deviations from equilibrium leave the other bidders’ payoffs unaffected. The equilibrium and its outcome will then persist if certain types of externalities arise between bidders. One example are externalities due to spiteful preferences, which...

A principal uses security bid auctions to award an incentive contract to one among several agents in the presence of hidden action and hidden information. Securities range from cash to equity and call options. “Steeper” securities are better surplus extractors that narrow the gap between the...

When a region successfully attracts a large firm by offering tax concessions, outright subsidies etc., the firm often commits itself to performance targets in terms of investment or employment. This paper interprets these contractually fixed targets as a consequence of incomplete information. It...

The literature on public goods has shown that efficient outcomes are impossible if participation constraints have to be respected. This paper addresses the question whether they should be imposed. It asks under what conditions efficiency considerations justify that individuals are forced to pay...

This article studies the design of optimal mechanisms to regulate entry in natural oligopoly markets, assuming the regulator is unable to control the behavior of firms once they are in the market. We adapt the Clark-Groves mechanism, characterize the optimal mechanism that maximizes the weighted...

The traditional approach to flexible retirement (e.g. NDC) neglects the impact of asymmetric information on actuarial fairness (neutrality). The mechanism design approach (e.g. Diamond, 2003) gives up the requirement of neutrality and looks for a redistributive second-best benefit-retirement-age...

In an environment with asymmetric information the implementation of a first-best efficient Clarke-Groves-Vickrey (D’Aspremont-Gérard-Varet) mechanism may not be feasible if it has to be self-financing. By using intergenerational transfers, the arising budget deficit can generally be covered...

We propose a smooth multibidding mechanism for environments where a group of agents have to choose one out of several projects. Our proposal is related to the multibidding mechanism (Pérez-Castrillo and Wettstein, 2002) but it is “smoother” in the sense that small variations in an agent’s...

The Mirrleesian model of income taxation restricts attention to simple allocation mechanism with no strategic interdependence, i.e., the optimal labor supply of any one individual does not depend on the labor supply of others. It has been argued by Piketty (1993) that this restriction is...

We use a unique hand collected data set of 6 258 auctions from the online football manager game Hattrick to study micro-patterns of reserve price formation. We find that chosen reserve prices exhibit both, very sophisticated and “irrational” behavior by the sellers. Reserve prices pick up...