Government-sponsored auctions for production rights (e.g., license auctions, privatizations, etc.) shape the industry structure. Are there mechanisms that induce an efficient industry structure (at least when there are no positive costs to public funds)? The answer is “no” whenever firms have private information about both fixed and marginal costs. Our analysis also suggests that the second-bes...

This paper finds an optimal mechanism for selling a good to a buyer who may be budget-constrained. We consider a seller with one unit of a good facing a buyer with a quasilinear utility function. If the buyer does not face a binding budget constraint, textbook monopoly pricing is optimal. By contrast, the possibility of a binding budget constraint can make it optimal for the seller to use nonli...

We document the existence of pricing styles in the concert industry. Artists differ in the extent to which they rely on secondand third-degree price discrimination and in how likely they are to sell out concerts. Most strikingly, artists who use multiple seating categories are more likely to vary prices across markets and less likely to sell out concerts. These patterns are difficult to explain...

A budget-constrained buyer wants to purchase items from a shortlisted set. Items are differentiated by observable quality and sellers have private reserve prices for their items. The buyer’s problem is to select a subset of maximal quality. Money does not enter the buyer’s objective function, but only his constraints. Sellers quote prices strategically, inducing a knapsack game. We derive the B...

Certain markets are illicit because part of the supply is coerced, but little known about optimal regulation such markets. We model a prostitution market with voluntary and coerced prostitutes ask what can restore benchmark outcome that would arise under laissez-faire absent coercion. Whereas current policies—decriminalization, criminalization buy or sell sides, licensing—are ineffective agains...

In this paper we present a theoretical model to study the characteristics and the commercial sustainability of dual licensing, an open source (OS) business strategy that has gained popularity among software vendors. With dual licensing, a firm releases the same software product under both a traditional proprietary license and an open source one. We show that the decision to employ a dual licens...

This paper studies slot allocation at congested airports in Europe. First, I discuss the inefficiencies of the current regulation, introduced as part of the liberalisation process of the air transport market. Then, I consider three marked based methods which are suitable to achieve a more efficient allocation of slots to airlines: congestion pricing, auctions and secondary trading. These method...

I study the ex-ante efficient allocation of a set of quality-heterogeneous objects to a number of heterogeneous risk-neutral agents. Agents have independent private values, which represent the maximum cost they are willing to sustain to obtain an object of unitary quality. The designer faces a trade-off between allocative efficiency and cost of screening, because the cost sustained is wasted. T...