This study examines the use of incentive mechanisms for employees in export and investment promotion agencies intended to improve their performance. It briefly describes these organizations and presents the contributions from economic theory that are useful to understand the agency problems that...

In many auction settings, there is favoritism: the seller's welfare depends positively on the utility of a subset of potential bidders. However, laws or regulations may not allow the seller to discriminate among bidders. We find the optimal nondiscriminatory auction in a private value,...

We compare the equilibria that result from sequential and simultaneous moves when two firms compete à la Bertrand in a homogeneous-good market. and firms’ unit costs are private information. Alternatively, our setup can be interpreted as a procurement auction with endogenous quantity where...

Most of the literature on auctions assumes that the auctioneer owns the object on sale. However most auctions are organized and run by an agent of the owner. This separation generates the possibility of corruption. We analyze the effect of a particular form of corruption on bidding behavior in a...

We compare equilibria with sequential and simultaneous moves under homogeneous-good Bertrand competition when unit costs are private information. Under an alternative interpretation, we examine the consequences of awarding a right of first refusal in a first-price procurement auction with...

We examine the problem of endogenous entry in a single-unit auction when the seller's welfare depends positively on the utility of a subset of potential bidders. We show that, unless the seller values those bidders?welfare more than her own ?private?utility, a nondiscriminatory auction is optimal.

We show that, under independent private values, no mechanism that contains a right-of-first-refusal clause can maximize the sum of the utilities of the seller and the right-holder.

When the owner of an object sells it through an auction run by an agent of hers, corruption may appear. In a first-price auction, corruption can make honest bidders more or less aggressive, or their behavior can remain unchanged. We identify sufficient conditions for each of the three...