ZEW Discussion Papers

Bidding in first-price auctions crucially depends on the beliefs of the bidders about their competitors' willingness to pay. We analyze bidding behavior in a first-price auction in which the knowledge of…

I investigate the decision problem of a player in a game of incomplete information who faces uncertainty about the other players' strategies. I propose a new decision criterion which works in two steps.…

We consider the problem of a principal who wishes to contract with a privately informed agent and is not able to commit to not renegotiating any mechanism. That is, we allow the principal, after observing…

Using a lab experiment, we investigate the real-life performance of envy-free and proportional cake-cutting procedures with respect to fairness and preference manipulation. We nd that envy-free…

I study the problem of allocating objects among agents without using money. Agents can receive several objects and have dichotomous preferences, meaning that they either consider objects to be acceptable…

This paper examines the determinants of sector-specific regulation imposed on broadband markets related both to efficiency objectives of regulators and to those of narrowly defined interest groups. We test…

Unbundling of vertically integrated utilities has become an integral element in the regulation of network industries and has been implemented in many jurisdictions. The idea of separating the network, as the…

Countries with high income inequality also show a strong association between parents’ and children’s economic well-being; i.e. low intergenerational mobility. This study is the first to test this relationship in…

In this paper, we show that, in terms of real disposable income, changes in housing expenditures dramatically exacerbate the trend of income inequality that has risen sharply in Germany since the mid-1990s. More…