In 1997 a review of the financial health of English county cricket highlighted strategic weaknesses within the professional game, principally an over-reliance by clubs on the annual grants provided to them by the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB). Without such grants the teams, in general...

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been delegated responsibility for assuring the navigability of waters designated for that purpose in the United States. Dredging is among the activities required to fulfill this responsibility. In some places, the Corps finds difficulty in carrying out...

We define the class of two‐player zero‐sum games with payoffs having mild discontinuities, which in applications typically stem from how ties are resolved. For such games, we establish sufficient conditions for existence of a value of the game, maximin and minimax strategies for the players,...

ISO New England proposes reserve markets designed to improve the existing forward reserve market and improve pricing during real-time reserve shortages. We support all of the main elements of the proposal. For example, we agree that little is gained by allowing reserve availability bids in the...

The FCC was an innovator in adopting the rules of the simultaneous ascending-price auction for its sales of spectrum licenses. While these rules have performed well in the auctions conducted so far (and would perform even better with the design improvements suggested in our first report), there...

During the transition to a competitive electricity market, when a consumer does not select an electricity provider, who provides service to the customer and at what price? An auction for this "standard offer service" is a market-based way to assign the service responsibility and to determine its...

This report reviews the proposed rules for restructured wholesale electricity markets in New England. We review the market rules, both individually and collectively, and identify potential problems that might limit the efficiency of these markets. We examine alternatives and identify the key...

An effective package bidding mechanism addresses three problems: the exposure problem (the risks a bidder faces in trying to construct an efficiently large combination of licenses), the free-rider problem (the difficulties small bidders have in beating those who bid for larger packages of...