This paper reports on an experimental test of a new market design that is attractive in theory but makes the common and potentially unrealistic assumption that "agents report their type"; that is, that market participants can perfectly report their preferences to the mechanism. Concerns about...

A well-developed theoretical literature -- dating back at least to Nordhaus (1969) -- has analyzed optimal patent policy design. We re-present the core trade-off of the Nordhaus model and highlight an empirical question which emerges from the Nordhaus framework as a key input into optimal patent...

We investigate whether private research investments are distorted away from long-term projects. Our theoretical model highlights two potential sources of this distortion: short-termism and the fixed patent term. Our empirical context is cancer research, where clinical trials - and hence, project...

We introduce and analyze a new market design for trading financial assets. The design allows traders to directly trade any user-defined linear combination of assets. Orders for such portfolios are expressed as downward-sloping piecewise-linear demand curves with quantities as flows...

Economists have long been puzzled by event-ticket underpricing: underpricing reduces revenue for the artist, and encourages socially wasteful rent-seeking by ticket brokers. Why not use an auction to set price correctly? This paper studies the introduction of auctions into this market by...

Economists have long been puzzled by event-ticket underpricing: underpricing both reduces revenue and encourages socially wasteful rent-seeking by ticket brokers. This paper studies the introduction of auctions into this market by Ticketmaster. We first show theoretically that Ticketmaster's...