The lobbying process is modelled as an auction with externalities in which lobbies bid to get implemented thei most-prefered policy. Further more, the government may influence the lobbying process itself by biasing the auction among organized interests. We identify the following trade-off :...

Recent U.S. legislation (Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act) allows commercial banks to enter merchant banking, i.e. hold equity in non-financial firms. A stylised auction-theoretic model is developed to investigate the effects of bank equity stakes in firms on the competition in bank loans. The main...

A profit-maximizing auctioneer can provide a public good to at most one of a number of groups of agents. The groups may have non-empty intersections. Each group member has a private value for the good being provided to the group. We investigate an auction mechanism where the auctioneer provides...

A profit-maximizing auctioneer can provide a public good to a group of agents. Each group member has a private value for the good being provided to the group. We investigate an auction mechanism where the auctioneer provides the good to the group, only if the sum of their bids exceeds a reserve...

We extend the "double auction" mechanism to a multi-commodity setup, or alternatively Shapley's "window"-mechanism to allow for limit orders.

Theoretical models of government formation in political science usually assume that the head of state in non-strategic. In this paper, we analyze the power of an agenda setter who chooses the order in which players are recognized to form coalitions in simple games.

We consider a political economy model of country whose citizens have heterogeneous preferences for a national policy and some regions may contemplate a threat of secession. The country is efficient if its break-up into smaller countries leads to aggregate utility loss. We show that in an...