We survey the recent European UMTS license auctions and compare their outcomes with the predictions of a simple model that emphasizes future market structure as a main determinant of valuations for licenses. Since the main goal of most spectrum allocation procedures is economic efficiency, and...

We study two-sided markets with a finite numbers of agents on each side, and with two-sided incomplete information. Agents are matched assortatively on the basis of costly signals. A main goal is to identify conditions under which the potential increase in expected output due to assortative...

Lecture on the first SFB/TR 15 meeting, Gummersbach, July, 18 - 20, 2004We analyze the allocation of priority in queues via simple bidding mechanisms. In our model, the stochastically arriving customers are privately informed about their own processing time. They make bids upon arrival at a...

We study the allocation of several heterogenous, commonly ranked objects to impatient agents with privately known characteristics who arrive sequentially according to a Poisson or renewal process. We analyze and compare the policies that maximize either welfare or revenue. We focus on two cases:...

We study two-sided markets with heterogeneous, privately informed agents who gain from being matched with better partners from the other side. Agents are matched through an intermediary. Our main results quantify the relative attractiveness of a coarse matching scheme consisting of two classes...

We study a contest with multiple, nonidentical prizes. Participants are privately informed about a parameter (ability) affecting their costs of effort. The contestant with the highest effort wins the first prize, the contestant with the second-highest effort wins the second prize, and so on...

In a unified framework, we survey the recent literature on partnership dissolution with interdependent values. Contrary to the private-values case, where the main obstacle hindering the construction of efficient trading mechanisms is the asymmetry in initial endowments, we find that...

We analyze maximization of revenue in the dynamic and stochastic knapsack problem where a given capacity needs to be allocated by a given deadline to sequentially arriving agents. Each agent is described by a two-dimensional type that reflects his capacity requirement and his willingness to pay...