We show that deliberately introducing a nested simulation stage can lead to significant variance reductions when comparing two stopping times by Monte Carlo. We derive the optimal number of nested simulations and prove that the algorithm is remarkably robust to misspecifications of this number....

In this article we propose a novel approach to reduce the computational complexity of the dual method for pricing American options. We consider a sequence of martingales that converges to a given target martingale and decompose the original dual representation into a sum of representations that...

In this article we propose a novel approach to reduce the computational complexity of various approximation methods for pricing discrete time American options. Given a sequence of continuation values estimates corresponding to different levels of spatial approximation and time discretization, we...

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...

Auctions are the allocation-mechanisms of choice whenever goods and information in markets are scarce. Therefore, understanding how information affects welfare and revenues in these markets is of fundamental interest. We introduce new statistical concepts, k- and k-m-dispersion, for...

Many tasks can only be completed if several people contribute. Likewise, many institutions, e.g. voting rules, require the support of several people to implement specific decisions. In such situations, individual costs from supporting may decrease in the number of supporters. This holds true for...

In auction and mechanism design, Myerson's classical regularity condition is often too weak for a quantitative analysis of performance. For instance, ratios between revenue and welfare, or sales probabilities may vanish at the boundary of Myerson regularity. This paper introduces L-regularity as...