ZEW Discussion Papers

Web-based innovation indicators may provide new insights into firm-level innovation activities. However, little is known yet about the accuracy and relevance of web-based information for measuring innovation. In…

We study the role of commitment in a first-price auction environment. We devise a simple two-stage model in which bidders first submit an initial offer that the auctioneer can observe and then make a…

The targeted design of auctions has to take behavioral regularities into account. This paper explores whether procurement auction formats can take advantage of bidders' willingness-to-pay-willingness-to-accept…

We show that it is beneficial for a buyer to conduct a multi-stage mechanism if bidders are loss averse. In a first step, we derive a revenue equivalence principle. Fixing the multi-stage structure, the revenue…

Most school systems grant teachers and school principals considerable discretion in grade retention decisions. This paper argues that schools can exploit this discretion by selectively retaining students to…

We study preferences for tax simplification using new survey and experimental data for a representative sample of the German population. General wisdom seems to suggest that most tax systems are overly complex…

To what extent does a more competent public bureaucracy contribute to better economic outcomes? We address this question in the context of the US federal procurement of services and works, by combining…

In cake-cutting, strategy-proofness is a very costly requirement in terms of fairness: for n = 2 it implies a dictatorial allocation, whereas for n ≥ 3 it requires that one agent receives no cake. We show that a…

Governments increasingly use nudges to improve tax collection. We synthesize the growing literature that evaluates nudging experiments using meta-analytical methods. We find that simple reminders increase the…