This paper studies optimal auction design when the seller can affect the buyers' valuations through an unobservable ex ante investment. The key insight is that the optimal mechanism may have the seller play a mixed investment strategy so as to create correlation between the otherwise...

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...

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...

A budget-constrained buyer wants to purchase items from a shortlisted set. Items are differentiated by observable quality and sellers have private reserve prices for their items. Sellers quote prices strategically, inducing a knapsack game. The buyer's problem is to select a subset of maximal...

We derive the optimal incentive compatible and individually rational mechanisms to reallocate arbitrary given ownership shares among a set of agents. These mechanisms are optimal in the sense that they maximize social surplus of the final allocation subject to the aforementioned constraints and...

We analyze the infuence of the number of competitors, the costs of doping and the distribution of talents on the doping behavior. In an n-player strategic game modelled as an all-pay auction, the players have private information about their talent and the amount of doping. The main finding of...

We investigate experimentally on eBay how sellers set prices in "Buy-It-Now" (BIN) auctions. We find that the eBay format leads to prices substantially below those expected in second-price auctions. Moreover, our results reveal that the information available on eBay about buyer experience and...

Germany was the first country in Europe that auctioned off spectrum in the valuable 700 MHz band for mobile telecommunication usage. The German regulator decided to auction off this spectrum together with spectrum in the 900 MHz and 1800 MHz legacy bands. With only the three incumbent operators...

We examine bidding behavior in first-price sealed-bid and Dutch auctions, which are strategically equivalent under standard preferences. We investigate whether the empirical breakdown of this equivalence is due to (non-standard) preferences or due to the different complexity of the two formats,...

The coordination plays central role in the economics. The conventional economic theory looks at the market and enterprise (or hierarchy) as two different, separated manner of coordination of economic goods and services. However the modern organization theory, price theory and institutional...