The soft budget constraint syndrome, first identified and studied by Janos Kornai, arises when a seemingly unprofitable enterprise is bailed out by the government or the enterprise's creditors. In other words, the enterprise is not held to a fixed budget, but finds its budget constraint...

Auctions, normally considered as devices facilitating trade, also provide a way to probe mechanisms governing one's valuation of some good or action. One of the most intriguing phenomena in auction behavior is the winner's curse - the strong tendency of participants to bid more than rational...

We study a model where capacity installation by an incumbent firm serves to deter others from entering the industry. We argue that uncertainty about demand or costs forces the incumbent to choose a higher capacity level than it would under certainty. This higher level diminishes the...

This paper surveys the theoretical literature on the effect of soft budget constraints on economies in transition from centralization to capitalism; it also reviews our understanding of soft budget constraints in general. It focuses on the conception of the soft budget constraint syndrome as a...