A firm can merge with one of n potential partners. The owner of each firm has private information about both his firm's stand-alone value and a component of the synergies that would be realized by the merger involving his firm. We characterize incentive-efficient mechanisms in two cases. First,...

We first analyse legal provisions relating to corporate transparency in Germany. We show that despite the new securities trading law (WpHG) of 1995, the practical efficacy of disclosure regulation is very low. On the one hand, the formation of business groups involving less regulated legal forms...

This paper argues that in revising the Takeover Bid Directive, EU policymakers should adopt a neutral approach toward takeovers, i.e. enact rules that neither hamper nor promote them. The rationale behind this approach is that takeovers can be both value-creating and value-decreasing and there...

We test under what circumstances boards discipline managers and whether such interventions improve performance. We exploit exogenous variation due to the staggered adoption of corporate governance laws in formerly Communist countries coupled with detailed 'hard' information about the board's...

I find that current US's and EU's Antitrust laws -- in particular their "moderate"' leniency programmes that only reduce or at best cancel sanctions for price-fixing firms that self-report -- may make collusion enforceable even in one-shot competitive interactions, like Bertrand oligopolies and...

We study the government's decision to sell a state-owned enterprise to strategic investors in a common value auction setting. The government can choose to sell his control stake all at once, or to design a sequential auction of shares. The sequential auction allows information transmission, so...

We consider two ascending auctions and show that many of the (unwanted) collusive or signaling equilibria studied in the literature in the framework of the SEAMO (simultaneous English auction for multiple objects) don't have a counterpart in the JAMO (Japanese auction for multiple objects). We...

Multi-unit auctions are sometimes plagued by the so-called exposure problem. In this paper, we analyze a simple game called the 'chopstick auction' in which bidders are confronted with the exposure problem. We analyze the chopstick auction with incomplete information both in theory and in a...

Within the independent private-values paradigm, we derive the data-generating process of the winning bid for the last unit sold at multi-unit sequential English auctions when bidder valuations are draws from different distributions; i.e., in the presence of asymmetries. When the identity of the...

We prove the existence of an increasing equilibrium, and study the comparative statics of correlation in the k-double auction with affiliated private values. This is supposedly the simplest bilateral trading mechanism that allows for dependence in valuations between buyers and sellers. In the...