Contrary to common practice in selling homes and start-ups, mechanism design theory typically recommends English (increasing price) over Dutch (decreasing price) auctions. Yet this theory neglects the uncertain investment required to investigate purchases. We show that English and other standard...

Appendix is available at: 'https://ssrn.com/abstract=3034480' https://ssrn.com/abstract=3034480Perpetual licenses incent owners incentives to invest in the common value of public resources, but impede efficient reallocation of resources to higher-valued entrants. Short-term licenses improve...

This supplementary material contains additional calculations and related explanations, including a table of logarithmically modified Laplace transform, and details of economic applications. The paper to which these Appendices apply is available at the following URL:...

We present functional forms allowing a broader range of analytic solutions to common economic equilibrium problems. These can increase the realism of pen-and-paper solutions or speed large-scale numerical solutions as computational subroutines. We use the latter approach to build a tractable...

In the digital economy, user data is typically treated as capital created by corporations observing willing individuals. This neglects users' role in creating data, reducing incentives for users, distributing the gains from the data economy unequally and stoking fears of automation. Instead...

Many governments assign use licenses for natural resources, such as radio spectrum, fishing rights, and mineral extraction rights, through auctions or other market-like mechanisms. License design affects resource users' investment incentives, as well as the efficiency of asset allocation. No...

Ronald Dworkin's equality of resources, and the closely related concept of envy-freeness, are two of the fundamental ideas behind fair allocation of private goods. The appropriate analog to these concepts in a public decision-making environment is unclear, since all agents consume the same...

Most existing digital identity solutions are either centralized (e.g., national identity cards) or individualistic (e.g., most “self-sovereign” identity proposals). Outside of digital life, however, identity is typically social (for instance, “individual” data such as birthdate is shared...

A market for matching participants with each other, such as buyers and sellers of labor, faces two challenges: efficiently coordinating information acquisition processes such as job interviews; and efficiently coordinating high-value matches. We propose a general descending-price market design...

I argue that there exists a coherent and relevant tradition in economic thought that I label "price theory". I define it as neoclassical microeconomic analysis that reduces rich and often incompletely-specified models into "prices" (approximately) sufficient to characterize solutions to simple...