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...

Auctions are the allocation-mechanisms of choice whenever goods and information in markets are scarce. Therefore, understanding how information affects welfare and revenues in these markets is of fundamental interest. We introduce new statistical concepts, k- and k-m-dispersion, for...

Many tasks can only be completed if several people contribute. Likewise, many institutions, e.g. voting rules, require the support of several people to implement specific decisions. In such situations, individual costs from supporting may decrease in the number of supporters. This holds true for...

Information about the future may be instrumentally useful, yet scary. For example, many patients shy away from precise genetic tests about their dispositions for severe diseases. They are afraid that a bad test result could render them desperate due to anticipatory feelings. We show that...

We study the optimal design of information nudges for present-biased consumers who have to make sequential consumption decisions without exact prior knowledge of their long-term consequences. For arbitrary distributions of risk, there exists a consumer-optimal information nudge that is of cutoff...

Agents in a finite two-sided market are matched assortatively, based on costly investments. Besides signaling private, complementary types, investments generate direct benefits for partners. We explore quantitative properties of the equilibrium investment behavior. The bilateral external...