At procurement auctions, with bid preferences, qualified firms are treated special. A common policy involves scaling the bids of preferred firms by a discount factor for the purposes of evaluation only. Introducing such an asymmetry has three effects: first, preferred firms may inflate their...

We describe and compare numerical methods used to approximate equilibrium bid functions in models of auctions as games of incomplete information. In such games, private values are modelled as draws from bidder-specific type distributions and pay-your-bid rules are used to determine transactions...

In models of first-price auctions, when bidders are ex ante heterogenous, deriving explicit equilibrium bid functions is typically impossible, so numerical methods (such as polynomial approximations) are often employed to find approximate solutions. Recent theoretical research concerning...

Within the affiliated private-values paradigm, we develop a tractable empirical model of equilibrium behaviour at first-price, sealed-bid auctions. The model is non-parametrically identified, but the rate of convergence in estimation is slow when the number of bidders is even moderately large,...

Within the affiliated private-values paradigm, we develop a tractable empirical model of equilibrium behaviour at first-price, sealed-bid auctions. The model is non-parametrically identified, but the rate of convergence in estimation is slow when the number of bidders is even moderately large,...

I consider a multi-country trade model in which a subset of firms emit transboundary pollution as a by-product of production. Consumers are harmed by these emissions, creating a role for government intervention. Theoretically, the effects of trade liberalization on the level of pollution and...

The theoretical literature on asymmetric first-price auctions has focused mainly on settings with either (1) exactly two bidders or (2) an arbitrary number of bidders with types in a common support. Even though closed form solutions are typically impossible, there is enough structure in the...

Economists have, for some time, studied the factors that induce firm entry, lead to growth, and help firms succeed in various markets. Unfortunately, such patterns have not been considered for the so-called "green industries." Although policymakers might like to stimulate development of the...

In an effort to accommodate a change in the U.S. Federal Highway Administration's goals towards "race-neutral methods" concerning the involvement of Disadvantaged Business Enterprises in procurement contracting, the Texas Department of Transportation created a Learning, Information, Networking...

Standard models of horizontal strategic capital tax competition predict that, in a Nash equilibrium, tax rates are inefficiently low due to externalities - capital infl ow to one state corresponds to capital out ow for another state. Researchers often suggest that the federal government impose...