We describe and interpret bidding behavior in FCC Auction 73 for the C-block licenses. These licenses were initially offered subject to an open platform restriction, which was highly valued by firms such as Google. Google entered bids until its bids reached the C-block reserve price, thereby...

Previous work has addressed the relative vulnerability of different auction schemes to collusive bidding. The common wisdom is that ascending-bid and second-price auctions are highly susceptible to collusion. We show that the details of ascending-bid and second-price auctions, including bidder...

This paper uses results of lattice theory, convex analysis, and nonsmooth analysis to establish conditions for the existence of pure-strategy Nash equilibria when payoff functions are continuous but not quasi-concave. A class of economic games for which this theory is important is given.

In general, the result of the elimination of weakly dominated strategies depends on order. We define nice weak dominance. Under nice weak dominance, order does not matter. We identify an important class of games under which nice weak dominance and weak dominance are equivalent, and so order...

We consider the dynamic private provision of funds to a project that generates a flow of public benefits. Examples include fund drives for public television or university buildings. The games we study have complete information about payoffs, allow each player to contribute each period, and let...

We analyze a multiple-activity, principal-agent model in which the activities are naturally substitutable for the agent and complementary for the principal. A basic result is that the optimal compensation must cause the agent to view the activities as complements. This complementarity is...

We consider a team production problem in which the principal observes only the group output and not individual effort and in which the principal can only penalize an agent for poor performance if she has verifiable evidence that the agent in question did not fulfill his job assignment. In this...

I present a model of venture capital contracting in which contracts that involve a mixture of both debt and equity are efficient and dominate pure-equity and pure-debt financing. The optimal contract balances the venture capitalist's incentive to intervene in the project and the entrepreneur's...

Conventional wisdom in retail banking states that firm performance is dependent on higher average process performance. This paper refutes conventional wisdom and provides empirical evidence, which demonstrates that low process variation contributes significantly to firm performance. More...