We argue that the intrinsic inefficiency of proprietary software has historically created a space for alternative institutions that provide software as a public good. We discuss several sources of such inefficiency, focusing on one that has not been described in the literature: the...

We analyze an environment in which biddersʼ private values change over time due to both private investments and exogenous shocks. We demonstrate that a highly-decentralized mechanism achieves efficiency. The mechanism requires a stage of costly public announcements (i.e., signaling) to induce...

We introduce the interview assignment problem, which generalizes the one-to-one matching model of Gale and Shapley (1962) by introducing a stage of costly information acquisition. Agents may learn preferences over partners via costly interviews. Although there exist multiple equilibria where all...

In this paper we study "investment tournaments," a class of decision problems that involve gradual allocation of investment among several alternatives whose values are subject to exogenous shocks. The decision-maker's payoff is determined by the final values of the alternatives. An important...

We investigate the "generalized second price" auction (GSP), a new mechanism which is used by search engines to sell online advertising that most Internet users encounter daily. GSP is tailored to its unique environment, and neither the mechanism nor the environment have previously been studied...

This Paper introduces and formally models the variable value environment, where bidders' private values may change over time as a result of both private actions and exogenous shocks. Examples of private actions and exogenous shocks are complementary investments and exogenous changes in bidder's...