The existence of ex-ante strong incumbents may constitute a barrier to entry in auctions for goods such as licenses. Introducing inefficiencies that favor entrants is a way to induce entry and thus create competition. Designs such as the Anglo-Dutch auction have been proposed with this goal in...

A buyer with downward slopping demand faces a number of unit supply sellers. The paper characterizes optimal auctions in this setting. For the symmetric case, a uniform auction (with price equal to lowest rejected offer) is optimal when complemented with reserve prices for different quantities...

We study the relationship between collusion and corruption in a stylized model of repeated procurement where the cost of reporting corrupt bureaucrats gives rise to a free riding problem. As in Dixit (2015, 2016), cooperation among honest suppliers alleviates free-riding in reporting. However,...

We examine the incentives of a monopolistic search engine, funded by advertising, to provide reliable search results. We distinguish two types of search result: sponsored and organic (not-paid-for). Organic results are most important in searches for online content, while sponsored results are...

We propose a new theory of the demographic transition based on the evidence that body development during childhood is an important predictor of adult life expectancy. This theory is embodied in an OLG framework where fertility, longevity and education all result from individual decisions. The...

In this paper we analyze the long run effect of exogenous technological growth on the employment rate in a labor market with matching frictions when there is either individual or collective wage setting and different timing for setting wages, labor and capital. We obtain that the effect depends...