High unemployment rate is one of the main characteristics of the labour market in times of crisis. Even young people with university degrees have difficulties in finding their first jobs. Lack of work experience is often pointed out as being one of the main obstacles for that. The question...

We consider a model of oligopolistic firms that have private information about their cost structure. Prior to competing in the market a competitive advantage, i.e., a cost reducing technology, is allocated to a subset of the firms by means of a multi-object auction. After the auction either all...