The first essay, "Producers and Predators in a Multiple Community Setting" investigates how different ways of organizing the provision of local policing services in a multi-community setting affect the level of criminal activity, the spatial distribution of the population, the cost of policing,...

This dissertation contains three essays that combine applied models, institutional analysis and empirical work in order to understand developments in the Russian and Caspian energy sector following the breakup of the former Soviet Union. In the first essay entitled Partial Privatization:...

This work is composed of three essays on auction theory. In the first essay, we analyze the optimal auction of multiple non-identical objects when buyers are risk averse. We show that the auction forms that yield the maximum revenue in the risk neutral case are no longer optimal. In particular,...

The fundamental question I address in the dissertation is how the behavior of economic agents interacts with networks of relationships which underlie a wide set of economic situations. In Ch. 2, entitled "Decentralized Information Sharing in Oligopoly," I analyze the incentives of firms for...

One of the major areas for research and investment related to the Internet is the provision of quality of service (QoS). We remain confident that in the not-to-distance future, QoS will be introduced not only in private networks but in the whole Internet. QoS will bring some new features into...

In this work, I look at two competitive auction settings where a profit maximizing seller chooses auctions as a vehicle to sell to strategic bidders. In both essays, the auctioneers problem is the selection of the optimal auction format. In the first essay, the auctioneer has a single item to...