Both market (e.g. auctions) and non-market mechanisms (e.g. lotteries and priority lists) are used to allocate a large amount of scarce public resources that produce large private benefits and small consumption externalities. I study a model in which the use of both market and non-market...

An ecosystem comprises all downstream products that employ a certain upstream input. Consumers make irreversible investments to join an ecosystem before downstream prices are set. By committing to buy products that use the specific ecosystem input, they are at risk of being held-up. Unable to...

A seller has an object for sale and can reach buyers only through intermediaries, who also have privileged information about buyers’ valuations. Intermediaries can either mediate the transaction by buying the object and reselling it–the merchant model–or refer buyers to the seller and...