This paper studies an auction model in which one of the bidders, the insider, has better information about a common component of the value of the good for sale, than the other bidders, the outsiders. Our main result shows that the insider may have incentives to disclose her private information if she faces sufficiently strong competition from the outsiders. We also show that the insider can pro...

Cleansing or curse? Menstruation in our lifetime has been commonly called ‘The Curse’. Our sisters in the 16th century, however, welcomed this cleansing as a fertility sign from God, through the moon that determined the tides of all that flowed on the earth. These tides included the four humorous fluids that made up each of us and determined, by balance, the health of an individual. Ancient med...

Natural resource extraction forms the backbone of the Russian economy and characterizes the majority of regions and communities in the Russian North. The long-term socio-economic sustainability of natural resource extraction in resource abundant countries has been questioned and discussed in various social sciences with the resource curse theory, which, however, is understudied on the local lev...

BACKGROUND In a restricted sense, the resource curse is a theory that explains the inverse relationship classically seen between dependence on natural resources and economic growth. It defines a peculiar economic and political environment, epitomized by oil extraction in sub-Saharan Africa. METHODS Based on secondary research and illustrations from four oil-rich geographical areas (the Niger ...

We consider convex approximations of the expected value function of a two-stage integer recourse problem. The convex approximations are obtained by perturbing the distribution of the random right-hand side vector. It is shown that the approximation is optimal for the class of problems with totally unimodular recourse matrices. For problems not in this class, the result is a convex lower bound t...