In a model with private information of the worker about her ability and unobservable effort choice, the role of public and private employment services is analyzed. The coexistence of an inefficient employment exchange and an efficient private agency may lead to optimal screening with first best...

Are commonly known beliefs essential for bidding behavior in asymmetric auctions? Our experimental results suggest that not informing participants how values are randomly generated does not change behavior much and may even make it appear more rational.

In Buy-It-Now auctions, sellers can post a take-it-or-leave-it price offer prior to an auction. While the literature almost exclusively looks at buyers in such combined mechanisms, the current paper summarizes results from the sellers' point of view. Buy-It-Now auctions are complex mechanisms...

The background for the general mathematical link between utility and informationtheory investigated in this paper is a simple financial market model with two kinds of small traders: less informed traders and insiders, whose extra information is represented by an enlargement of the other agents...

We document experimentally how biased self-assessments affect the outcome of labor markets. In the experiments, we exogenously manipulate the self-confidence of participants in the role of workers regarding their relative performance by employing hard and easy real-effort tasks. Participants in...