We present a general model of bidding behavior in wildlife corridor auctions. Given (i) some spatial configuration of landowners in a landscape, (ii) the landowners' opportunity costs, and (iii) the value of establishing the corridor, our model predicts individual landowners' bids, overall...

We contribute to the literature on the optimal design of auction mechanisms for the procurement of nature conservation activities. We use an economic experiment to examine whether the market efficiency of conservation auctions increases or decreases with repetition. Theory predicts that...

Aftermarket social welfare is largely determined by a procurement auction design. Auctions select firms for operating aftermarkets, and auctions may also impose restrictions on aftermarket prices the winner can charge. This paper compares aftermarket social welfare generated by first-price and...

A government officials' propensity to corruption, or corruptibility, can be affected by his intertemporal preference over job benefits. Through a dynamic model of rent-seeking behavior, this paper examines how endogenously determined corruptibility changes with monitoring intensity, salary...

This paper explores the feasibility to extend the Standard Cost Model (SCM) for calculating the costs of government regulation by taking all transaction costs into account which stem from the principal/agent relationship between regulatory authorities and economic entities. From that perspective...

Information affecting a candidate's reputation might have significant electoral consequences. Do candidates respond to the release of information? Using Brazilian elections and audits as an exogenous source of information, I show that both incumbent and challenger increase their campaign...

Variation in assessor stringency in awarding benefits leaves applicants exposed to uninsured risk that could be systematic if discretion were exercised selectively. We test for this using administrative data on applications to the Dutch disability insurance program. We find that discretion is...

The consequences of granting democratic rights to citizens in otherwise authoritarian regimes has been extensively studied. Much less is know about the implications of retracting these rights when a government wants to recentralize power. Autonomous governance in rural China, introduced in the...

A common assumption in the analysis of symmetric auctions is that the bidders' value estimates exhibit positive informational externalities (PIE). This assumption implies upward drifting price sequences at sequential auctions, which is challenged by an empirical regularity, known as the...