In mechanism design, Myerson regularity is often too weak for a quantitative analysis of performance. For instance, ratios between revenue and welfare, or sales probabilities may vanish at the boundary of Myerson regularity. This paper therefore explores the quantitative version of Myerson...

Small farms and fragmented plots are hallmarks of agriculture in less-developed countries, and there is evidence of high returns to land consolidation and reallocation. Complementarities, holdout and asymmetric information mean that private trade will be slow to reallocate land, and imply that...

Due to computing and communication facilities, formal procedures, often referred to as ‘algorithms’, are now extensively used in public, economic and social areas. These procedures, currently at the forefront of criticisms, share some features with mechanisms as defined by economists,...

Millions of citizens and firms lack access to high speed internet, even though governments pledged to spend huge sums of money to subsidize internet networks. In this paper we review some systematic flaws of present subsidy policies and outline a promising alternative. We propose that...

Millions of citizens and firms lack access to high speed internet, even though governmentspledged to spend huge sums of money to subsidize internet networks. In this paper we reviewsome systematic flaws of present subsidy policies and outline a promising alternative. We proposethat governments...

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 two...

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...

We conducted a controlled field experiment on eBay and examined to what extent both social and competitive laboratory behavior is robust to institutionally complex real world markets with experienced traders, who selected themselves into these markets. EBay's natural trading system provides...

This paper examines the effect that endangered species regulation has on natural resource development. Specifically, we use data from competitive auctions to estimate the effect that land-use regulation protecting endangered caribou in the Canadian province of Alberta has on the price producers...

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 in...