Both theoretical and empirical evidence suggest that, in markets with standards competition, strong network effects can make the strong grow stronger and even "tip" the market towards a single, winner-take-all standard. We theorize that the presence of conversion technologies will reduce the...

Tunneling behavior, which is defined as the transfer of assets and profits out of a firm for the benefit of the firms controlling shareholders, has become the focus of increasing attention in the theoretical and empirical literature. There are some corporate governance procedures, however, that...

Product bundling is a business strategy that packages (either physically or logically), prices and sells groups of two or more distinct products or services as a single economic entity. This practice exploits variations in the reservation prices and the valuations of a bundle vis-à-vis its...

Informational assumptions are an important aspect of the study of auctions in economictheory. However, there has been limited research into how the assumptions made by theoristsimpact their results. I explore two different aspects of the information available to biddersin auctions. The...

Adaptive learning is important in dynamic models since it is a process that shows the improvement in the understanding of the agents of the model. Whenever there is a dynamic environment, there is a room for improvement through learning. In this thesis I analyze the adaptive learning of the...

In the first chapter, ¡°All-Pay Auctions with Resale¡±, I study equilibria of first- and second-price all-pay auctions with resale when players' signals are affiliated and symmetrically distributed. I show that existence of resale possibilities introduces an endogenous element to players'...

This dissertation examines the reasons for which a seller may decide to conduct a multi-unit auction sequentially rather than simultaneously. It analyzes the manner in which the information generated during a sequential auction can affect bidding to the seller's benefit and demonstrates the...

The first essay, "Producers and Predators in a Multiple Community Setting" investigates how different ways of organizing the provision of local policing services in a multi-community setting affect the level of criminal activity, the spatial distribution of the population, the cost of policing,...

This dissertation contains three essays that combine applied models, institutional analysis and empirical work in order to understand developments in the Russian and Caspian energy sector following the breakup of the former Soviet Union. In the first essay entitled Partial Privatization:...

This work is composed of three essays on auction theory. In the first essay, we analyze the optimal auction of multiple non-identical objects when buyers are risk averse. We show that the auction forms that yield the maximum revenue in the risk neutral case are no longer optimal. In particular,...