This discussion paper has led to a publication in the <A href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047272710000721">'Journal of Public Economics'</A>. The quality of public management is a recurrent concern in many countries. Calls to attract the economy's best and brightest managers to the public sector abound. This paper studies self-selection into...</a>

We consider price-fee competition in bilateral oligopolies with perfectly-divisible goods, non-expandable infrastructures, concentrated agents on both sides, and constant marginal costs. We define and characterize stable market outcomes. Buyers exclusively trade with the supplier with whom they...

In this paper we propose the use of <I>preferred outcome</I> distributions as a new method to elicit individuals' value and probability weighting functions in decisions under risk. Extant approaches for the elicitation of these two key ingredients of individuals' risk attitude typically rely on a long,...</i>

This paper studies the second-best problem where not all links of a congestedtransportation network can be tolled. The second-best tax rule for thisproblem is derived for general static networks, so that the solution presentedis valid for any graph of the network and any set of tolling points...

We develop a new likelihood-based approach to sign trades in the absence of quotes. It is equally efficient as existing MCMC methods, but more than 10 times faster. It can deal with the occurrence of multiple trades at the same time, and noisily observed trade times. We apply this method to a...

In this note, we experimentally examine the relative performance of price-only auctions and multi-attribute auctions. We do so in procurement settings where the buyer can give the winning bidder incentives to exert effort on non-price dimensions after the auction. Both auctions theoretically...

Basing-point pricing is known to have been abused by geographically dispersed firms in order to eliminate competition on transportation costs. This paper develops a topographic test for collusive basing-point pricing. The method uses transaction data (prices, quantities) and customer project...

We investigate the interaction of regional population and employment in a simu1taneousmodel, allowing for interregional commuting. The proposed dynamic specificationdistinguishes between short-run and equilibrium adjustment effects and it encompassesthe lagged-adjustment specification that is...

The spatial activity patterns of firms in a multi-regional system are closely connected with the structure and evolution of regional labour markets. Based on an extensive data set (cross-section) on commuting flows in Germany, this paper aims to identify the relationship between entrepreneurial...

This discussion paper resulted in a publication in <Stochastic Models</I> (2012). Volume 28(3), pages 478-502.<P> We apply the splitting method to three well-known counting problems, namely 3-SAT, random graphs with prescribed degrees, and binary contingency tables. We present an enhanced version of the splitting method...</p></stochastic>