Publications of the Research Unit Market Design

  1. Refereed Journal // 2021

    Products liability, consumer misperceptions, and the allocation of consumers to firms

    This article shows that insulating market outcomes from consumers' misperceptions about product risk by compensating them fully for harm is not necessarily socially optimal. When firms offer products with…

  2. ZEW Discussion Paper No. 20-091 // 2020

    Optimal Auctions with Signaling Bidders

    The authors study optimal auctions in a symmetric private values setting, where bidders’ care about winning the object and a receiver’s inference about their type. They reestablish revenue equivalence when…

  3. ZEW Discussion Paper No. 20-087 // 2020

    Consumer Salience and Quality Provision in (Un)Regulated Public Service Markets

    This paper examines the publication of quality indicators in service markets with public finance systems, such as education and healthcare markets. We provide a spatial model of product differentiation in which…

  4. ZEW Discussion Paper No. 20-082 // 2020

    Split-Award Auctions and Supply Disruptions

    Problem Definition: We consider a buyer that needs to source a fixed quantity. She faces several potential suppliers that might fail to deliver. The buyer conducts a procurement auction to determine contract…

  5. ZEW Discussion Paper No. 20-075 // 2020

    Complex Pricing and Consumer-Side Attention

    This paper analyzes a market in which two horizontally differentiated firms compete by setting menus of two-part tariffs, and in which some consumers are not informed about the linear per-unit price component.…

  6. ZEW Discussion Paper No. 20-074 // 2020

    Booster Draft Mechanism for Multi-Object Assignment

    We describe a new mechanism - what we call a booster draft - for allocating multiple, indivisible objects among a group of individuals. The mechanism’s appeal lies in its strategy-proofness and simplicity:…