The German response to the Fukushima nuclear power plant incident was possibly the most significant change of policy towards nuclear power outside Japan, leading to a sudden and very significant shift in the underlying power generation structure in Germany. This provides a very useful natural...

The German response to the Fukushima nuclear power plant incident was possibly the most significant change of policy towards nuclear power outside Japan, leading to a sudden and very significant shift in the underlying power generation structure in Germany. This provides a very useful natural...

Auctions with endogenous rationing have been introduced to stimulate competition. Such (procurement) auctions reduce the volume put out to tender when competition is low. This paper finds a strong negative effect of endogenous rationing on participation when bid-preparation is costly,...

We describe a new mechanism - what we call a booster draft - for allocating multiple, indivisible objects among a group of individuals. The mechanism's appeal lies in its strategy-proofness and simplicity: Individuals take turns drawing objects from different sets - called boosters - and simply...

Problem Definition: We consider a buyer that needs to source a fixed quantity. She faces several potential suppliers that might fail to deliver. The buyer conducts a procurement auction to determine contract suppliers and can choose between single-sourcing and multi-sourcing. If contract...

We design and implement an iterative, program-proposing deferred acceptance mechanism with ties (IDAT) and apply it to childcare assignment in two German cities. The mechanism can accommodate complementarities in providers' preferences, is fast to terminate even in larger cities, is difficult to...

We explore the possibility of designing matching mechanisms that can accommodate non-standard choice behavior. We pin down the necessary and sufficient conditions on participants' choice behavior for the existence of stable and incentive compatible mechanisms. Our results imply that...

In a lab experiment, we analyze the benefits of increasing competition on auction platforms hosting multiple auctioneers of a homogeneous good. We find that increasing competition by merging separated individual auctions increases market efficiency and also buyers' payoffs, while there is no...

We study optimal mechanisms for a utilitarian designer who seeks to assign a finite number of goods to a group of ex ante heterogeneous agents with unit demand. The agents have heterogeneous marginal utilities of money, which may naturally arise in environments where agents have different wealth...

I examine the role of intermediaries on the world's largest peer-to-peer online lending platform. This marketplace as well as other recently opened lending websites allow people to auction microcredit over the internet and are in line with the disintermediation in financial transactions through...