Optimal rank-order tournaments have traditionally been studied using a first-order approach. The present analysis relies instead on the construction of an "upper envelope" over all incentive compatibility conditions. It turns out that the first-order approach is not innocuous. For example, in...

Szidarovszky and Okuguchi (Games and Economic Behavior, 1997) have provided useful conditions for the existence of a unique pure-strategy Nash equilibrium in rent-seeking games of complete information. In this paper, we generalize their results to contests with incomplete informa tion. Two...

This paper offers a game theoretic model of liquidity provision through repeated central bank tenders, in the spirit of the operational framework of the Eurosystem. Banks are required to satisfy reserve requirements subject to an averaging provision over individual maintenance periods, and...

On several occasions during the period 2001-2003, the European Central Bank (ECB) decided to deviate from its “neutral” benchmark allotment rule, with the effect of not alleviating a temporary liquidity shortage in the banking system. This is remarkable because it implied the possibility of...

We model the interbank market for overnight credit with heterogeneous banks and asymmetric information. An unsophisticated bank just trades to compensate its liquidity imbalance, while a sophisticated bank will exploit its private information about the liquidity situation in the market. It is...

In certain market environments, a large investor may benefit from building up a futures position first and trading subsequently in the spot market (Kumar and Seppi, 1992). The present paper identifies a variation of this type of manipulation that might occur in money markets with an interest...

The fixed rate tender is one of the main procedural formats relied upon by central banks in their implementation of monetary policy. This fact stands in a somewhat puzzling contrast to the prevalent view in the theoretical literature that the procedure, by fixing interest rate and quantity at...

It is argued that bidders in liquidity-providing central bank operations should typically possess declining marginal valuations. Based on this hypothesis, we construct an equilibrium in central bank refinancing operations organised as variable rate tenders. In the case of the discriminatory...

This paper contributes to the existing literature on central bank repoauctions. It is based on a structural econometric approach, whereby the primitives of bidding behavior (individual bid schedules and bid-shading components) are directly estimated. With the estimated parameters we calibrate a...

A standard repurchase agreement between two counterparties is considered to examine the endogenous choice of collateral assets, the feasibility of secured lending, and welfare implications of the central bank’s collateral framework. As an important innovation, we allow for two-sided...