Nowadays many employers offer their employees the possibility of an insurance against too large losses in income when retiring or becoming disabled. This paper models the optimization problem of the employer when setting up such a so-called pension fund. Not surprisingly, it turns out that the...

With a laboratory experiment, we study the impact of buy-options and the corresponding buy-price on revenues and bidding behavior in (online) proxy-auctions with independent private valuations. We show that temporary buy-options may reduce revenues for two reasons: At low buy-prices, the...