Publications of the Research Unit Market Design

Consumers acquire information through their own search efforts or through word-of-mouth communication within their social network. Information diffusion leads to free-riding and less active search. Free-riding…

The usual analysis of bidding in first-price auctions assumes that bidders know the distribution of valuations. We analyze first-price auctions in which bidders do not know the precise distribution of…

I consider a seller selling a good to bidders with two-dimensional private information: their valuation for a good and their characteristic. While valuations are non-verifiable, characteristics are partially…

We study optimal mechanisms for a utilitarian designer who seeks to assign a finite number of goods to a group of ex ante heterogeneous agents with unit demand. The agents have heterogeneous marginal utilities…

In markets where sellers’ marginal costs of production have a common component, they have informational advantage over buyers regarding those costs. This information asymmetry between sellers and buyers is…

We study multi-category housing allocation problems: A set of objects, which is sorted into categories of equal size, has to be allocated to a set of individuals, such that everyone obtains exactly one object…

In a lab experiment, we analyze the benefits of increasing competition on auction platforms hosting multiple auctioneers of a homogeneous good. We find that increasing competition by merging separated individual…