Deciding whether bidders at auctions are playing a best response is perhaps one of the most fundamental questions faced by empirical workers employing the structural econometric approach. Investigations of this question depend heavily on whether the true valuations of bidders are observed. We develop an approach to bound best-response violations when bidders’ private values are unobserved in mu...

A network approach is proposed to analyze endogenous cross-holdings and their competitive implications. The approach is motivated by the bilateral arrangement of passive ownership held by Microsoft in Apple in 1997. For a model of Cournot oligopoly with a homogeneous product, it is shown that (i) there is a unique “pairwise stable” cross-holding structure, in which firms hold the maximum allowa...

We construct a model of participation and bidding at multi-unit, sequential, ascending-price auctions when bidders can potentially have multi-unit demand. We then describe conditions sufficient to characterize a strategic equilibrium of the auction game. Subsequently, we demonstrate that this equilibrium induces an efficient allocation and then propose an algorithm to calculate the expected win...

This paper uses an institutional approach to investigate the relationship between the regional institutional environment and regional new firm formation. The importance of perceived attitudes regarding private enterprises, local taxes, political majority, the size of the government sector and perceived rules and bureaucracy on new firm formation in 286 Swedish municipalities are investigated. T...

This paper discusses how ICT and emerging electronic commerce in consumer products influence the relative efficiency in production of households and firms, resulting in changes in the division of tasks between these two types of agents. Increased information and competence of households, in combination with stiffer competition among firms, will also increase the power of households relative to ...

This paper provides a simple model of corruption dynamics with the ratchet effect. Corrupt officials have ex post the incentive to price discriminate entrepreneurs based on the entry decisions made in an earlier period. The inability of government officials to commit to future money demands induces entrepreneurs to delay entry in order to receive a discount in the permit price later. Even thoug...

This paper discusses how ICT and emerging electronic commerce in consumer products influence the relative efficiency in production of households and firms, resulting in changes in the division of tasks between these two types of agents. Increased information and competence of households, in combination with stiffer competition among firms, will also increase the power of households relative to ...

Within a flexible regression model (Hamilton, 2001) we offer a battery of new Lagrange multiplier statistics that circumvent the problem of unidentified nuisance parameters under the null hypothesis of linearity and that are robust to the specification of the covariance function that defines the random field. These advantages are the result of (i) switching from the L2 to the L1 norm; and (ii) ...

This paper provides a simple model of corruption dynamics with the ratchet effect. Corrupt officials have ex post the incentive to price discriminate entrepreneurs based on the entry decisions made in an earlier period. The inability of government officials to commit to future money demands induces entrepreneurs to delay entry in order to receive a discount in the permit price later. Even thoug...

General Equilibrium and the Emergence of (Non) Market Clearing Trading Institutions We consider a pure exchange economy, where for each good several trading institutions are available, only one of which is market-clearing. The other feasible trading institutions lead to rationing. To learn on which trading institutions to coordinate, traders follow behavioural rules of thumb that are based on t...