We study the repeal of a regulation that imposed maximum wholesale and retail markups for all but five fresh fruits and vegetables. We compare the prices of products affected by regulation before and after the policy change and use the unregulated products as a control group. We find that...

This paper examines the problem of how to design incentive-compatible mechanisms in environments in which the agents' private information evolves stochastically over time and in which decisions have to be made in each period. The environments we consider are fairly general in that the agents'...

Previous researchers have modelled the decision to accept a donor organ for transplantation as a Markov decision problem, the solution to which is often a control-limit optimal policy: accept any organ whose match quality exceeds some health-dependent threshold; otherwise, wait for another. When...

In linked employer-employee databases, when the employees are sampled first and then the employers data are attached, the set of firms that enter the sample is biased towards the large dimension. In this paper I discuss two strategies to impute inflating factors to the employers’ records, and...

A product exhibits personal fit uncertainty when its consumers have idiosyncratic and uncertain values for it. Often a consumer can learn her long-run value quickly by obtaining the good for a trial period. Money back guarantees of satisfaction are commonly used to lower the cost to consumers of...

We describe and compare numerical methods used to approximate equilibrium bid functions in models of auctions as games of incomplete information. In such games, private values are modelled as draws from bidder-specific type distributions and pay-your-bid rules are used to determine transactions...

In models of first-price auctions, when bidders are ex ante heterogenous, deriving explicit equilibrium bid functions is typically impossible, so numerical methods (such as polynomial approximations) are often employed to find approximate solutions. Recent theoretical research concerning...

Using a clock model of a multi-unit, oral, ascending-price auction, within the commonvalue paradigm, we analyse the asymptotic behaviour of the transaction price as the number of bidders gets large. We find that even though the transaction price is determined by a (potentially small) fraction of...

This paper examines the structures behind competitive transformation in telecommunications. The analysis is based on qualitative evidence from Telefonica’s transformation since the mid-1980s and comparisons with BT, Orange, and Deutsche Telekom. Telecommunications is a critical industry...