In its attempts to deter and prosecute big rigging, U.S. antitrust authorities have focused on sealed-bid procurements, rather than on ascending-bid auctions. One possible justification for this focus is the idea, supported by the existing theoretical literature, that collusion creates...

A utility maximizing model of allocating limited attention between adopting new behaviors and adapting current behaviors generates an optimal policy that resembles commonly observed, and apparently irrational, behavioral rules. The ability to update current behaviors implies an endogenous...

Auctions are considered with a (non-symmetric) independent-private-value model of valuations. It shall be demonstrated that a utility equivalence principle holds for an agent if and only if she has constant absolute risk aversion.

This paper examines ways of taxing monopolistically competitive firms that pollute the environment. There are two sources of welfare loss: production externalities and product selection bias associated with fixed costs. We argue that the optimal firm specific tax is always, strictly speaking,...

This paper provides an axiomatization of a cardinal welfare measure for the evaluation of income and opportunity. Following Roemer's (1998) formulation of equality of opportunity, we divide the society in n effort groups consisting of subsets of agents who exert a comparable degree of effort. We...