No measurement without theory. Ex post inferences from descriptive statistics or regression analyses are often misleading. Although this is well known, it is still a frequent occurrence. In this paper we illustrate the problem by analysing a dataset that appears to suggest that there is a...

Rationales und emotionales Verhalten werden zu Unrecht als vollständige Gegensätze angesehen. Automatisch entstehende Emotionen dienen vielmehr einer oft vorteilhaften Selbstbindung. Objektiv irrationale Drohungen werden glaubhaft, Versprechungen müssen nicht durch kostspielige Verträge oder...

We analyze the problem of selling shares of a divisible good to a large number of buyers when demand is uncertain. We characterize equilibria of two popular mechanisms, a fixed price mechanism and a uniform price auction, and compare the revenues. While in the auction truthful bidding is a...

In German mobile phone contracts, calls in the provider's home net are usually less expensive than external calls (to the network of a competitor). Thus customers have to compare vectors of prices, and such a comparison can be the source of a fallacy in the presence of network externalities....

We present laboratory experiments of five different multi-unit auction mechanisms. Two units of a homogeneous object were auctioned off among two bidders with flat demand for two units. We test whether expected demand reduction occurs in open and sealed-bid uniform-price auctions. We also test...

This article studies the design of optimal mechanisms to regulate entry in natural oligopoly markets, assuming the regulator is unable to control the behavior of firms once they are in the market. We adapt the Clark-Groves mechanism, characterize the optimal mechanism that maximizes the weighted...

In the wake of the Enron and Worldcom financial scandals that rocked Wall Street in 2002, the US government’s financial regulatory body, the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) took the unprecedented step in June 2002 of requiring that the chief executives and chief financial officers of...

In this paper we propose a three–level computational equilibrium model that allows to analyze the impact of the regulatory environment on transmission line expansion (by the regulator) and investment in generation capacity (by private firms) in liberalized electricity markets. The basic...