Auctions are the allocation-mechanisms of choice whenever goods and information in a market are scarce. Therefore, understanding how information in these markets affects welfare and revenues is of fundamental interest. We introduce new mathematical concepts, k- and k-m-dispersion, for...

We study the allocation of German lawyers to different regional courts for their compulsory legal traineeship. The number of applicants exceeds the number of available positions in a given time period in some regions, so that not all lawyers can be matched simultaneously. As a consequence some...

In health service markets, patients often rely on the advice of their general practitioner (GP) to decide which treatment best fits their needs. Hospitals, in turn, influence GPs referral decisions through kickbacks. We formulate a model with competitive heterogeneous GPs who differ in the...

Empirical evidence shows that low cost of signaling interest in offers can result in a significant number of inappropriate signals. This paper provides a theoretical explanation for this observation as an equilibrium outcome of a model with utility maximizing fully rational agents that decide to...

We build a model of collective reputation under moral hazard to analyze incentives under collective reputation. Producers can produce high quality, but it is only imperfectly detected. Products not detected as of high quality are pooled by to the collective reputation structure. Collective...

Many markets ban monetary transfers. Rather than exogenously imposing this constraint, we introduce discrimination-freeness as a desideratum based on egalitarian objectives. Discrimination-freeness requires that an agent's object assignment is independent of his wealth. We show that money cannot...

With less than 2% of new renewable energy production, Switzerland is a poor performer in international comparison. A study carried out for the Swiss Federal Office of Energy showed constraints explaining this low number. One of these is a need for companies to optimize their sales process....

This paper analyzes a contest for market shares where two homogeneous firms compete by investing either simultaneously or sequentially. Standard theory predicts that equilibrium investments and payoffs are independent of the order of moves. To test this prediction, we implement two treatments in...