In German literature, particularly in poetry, an amazing wealth of illustrations for economic contract theory can be found. Signaling, screening, incentive contracts, the winner's curse, and even the prisoner's dilemma within a team are treated by different writers. The respective examples are...

This paper considers sequential auctions where an individual's value for a bundle of objects is either greater than the sum of the values for the objects separately (positive synergy) or less than the sum (negative synergy). The authors show that the existence of positive synergies implies...