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,...

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...

Recently, the combinatorial clock auction has become more and more common in the auctioning of telecommunication licenses. Although the auction design is complex, the promise is that bidding becomes simple - truthtelling is ‘close to optimal’. We show that this claim is too strong. The...

In recent years, regulatory bodies in Europe and around the world implemented Combinatorial Clock Auctions (CCA) to allocate scarce and valuable spectrum frequencies usage rights. Although the auction design is complex, the promise is that bidding becomes simple. More precisely, bidders may bid...

High transaction costs and thin participation plague water quality trading and prevent markets from delivering expected efficiency gains. Point sources generate a single pollutant, while nonpoint sources generate multiple, complementary pollutants. We develop a dynamic search model of...

Various markets ban or heavily restrict monetary transfers. This is often motivated by moral concerns. However, it appears to be disputable whether the observed restrictions on transfers are the appropriate market design answer to these concerns. Instead of exogenously restricting transfers on a...

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...

We study the effects of improvements in market transparency on eBay on seller exit and continuing sellers' behavior. An improvement in market transparency by reducing strategic bias in buyer ratings led to a significant increase in buyer valuation especially of sellers rated poorly prior to the...

This paper gives an account of events, and explains some systematic reasons of the UMTS auction flop in Switzerland. Apart from general market developments, which could not have been anticipated, we argue that auctiondesign which was introduced in England and adopted in Switzerland and elsewhere...

The second-generation GSM spectrum auction in Germany is probably the most clear cut example of a low price outcome in a simultaneous ascending-bid auction.The present paper gives an account of the events, describes the auction rules and market conditions, and provides a theoretical explanation...