Diversified firms often trade at a discount with respect to their focused counterparts. The literature has tried to explain the apparent misallocation of resources with lobbying activities or power struggles. We show that diversification can destroy value even when resources are efficiently...

Collusive equilibria exist in open ascending auctions with multiple objects, if the number of the bidders is sufficiently small relative to the number of objects, even with large complementarities in the buyers' utility function. The bidders collude by dividing the objects among themselves,...

We identify and analyze three distinct effects arising from potentially binding budget constraints in multi-unit ascending auctions. First, binding budgets clearly reduce the level of competition among bidders. Second, budget constraints may at the same time make it difficult to sustain...

We analyze the rational expectation equilibria of a delegated portfolio management model in which two risky assets have completely independent returns and liquidity shocks. Some managers have perfect information on the assets' returns while others are uninformed and try to infer information from...

In a number of observed procurements, the buyer has employed an auction format that allows for a split-award outcome. We focus on settings where the range of uncertainty regarding scale economies is large and, depending on cost realizations, the efficient allocations include split-award outcomes...

In a number of observed procurements, the buyer has employed an auction format that allows for a split-award outcome. We focus on settings where the range of uncertainty regarding scale economies is large and, depending on cost realizations, the efficient allocations include split-award outcomes...

Should a subset of member states of a federation be allowed to form a sub-union on some policy issue? When centralization is not politically feasible, allowing an enhanced cooperation agreement among a subset of countries permits the latter to gain benefits which would otherwise be lost....

A reverse merger (RM) is a technique in which a private company is acquired by a shell or defunct public company via stock swap. As a result, the private company becomes public. The main difference between an IPO and a RM is that an IPO allows going public and also allows raising capital while...

We study the optimal design of the rules of trade in a two-period market given that agents arrive at different times and may only trade with agents present contemporaneously. First period agents face a fixed cot of trading across periods, and their decisions of whether or not to trade in the...