Information technology, like the telephone, influences market access; this paper answers the question about a reverse effect, does market access affect information technology, in particular its adoption?  Using the introduction of the telephone in Bavaria, I demonstrate with a rank, order and...

We usually assume increases in supply, allocation by rationing, and exclusion of potential buyers will never raise prices. But all of these activities raise the expected price in an important set of cases when common-value assets are sold. Furthermore, when we make the assumptions needed to rule...

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Economic Theory is often abused in practical policy-making. There is frequently excessive focus on sophisticated theory at the expense of elementary theory; too much economic knowledge can sometimes be a dangerous thing. Too little attention is paid to the wider economic context, and to the...

The most important issues in auction design are the traditional concerns of competition policy-preventing collusive, predatory, and entry deterring behaviour. Ascending and uniform-price auctions are particularly vulnerable to these problems (we discuss radiospectrum and football TV-rights...

We use a classroom game, the Wallet Game, to show that slight asymmetries between bidders can have very large effects on prices in standard ascending (i.e. English) auctions of common-values objects. Examples of small asymmetries are a small value advantage for one bidder or a small ownership of...

This paper reviews the part played by economists in organizing the British third-generation mobile-phone licence auction that concluded on 27 April 2000. It raised £22 1/2 billion ($34 billion or 2 1/2% of GNP) and was widely described at the time as the biggest auction ever. We discuss the...

There were enormous differences in the revenues from the European third generation (3G, or UMTS) mobile-phone license auctions, from 20 Euros per capita in Switzerland to 650 Euros per capita in the U.K., though the values of the licences sold were similar. Poor auction designs in some countries...

I suggest explanations for the apparently puzzling bidding in the year 2000 British and German 3G telecom auctions. Relative-performance maximisation may have been important, but the outcome of the British auction seems to have been efficient. This paper bundles my comments on two papers...

We develop a new automatically-computable test for super exogeneity, using a variant of general-to-specific modeling.  Based on the recent developments of impulse saturation applied to marginal models under the null that no impulses matter, we select the significant impulses for testing in the...