The seminal paper by Milgrom and Weber (1982) ranks the expected revenues of several auction mechanisms, taking the decision to sell as exogenous. We endogenize the sale decision. The owner decides whether or not to sell, trading off the conditional expected revenue against his own use value, and buyers take into account the information contained in the owner’s sale decision. We show that reven...

the chance to control temperature rises.” The British government is sending Stern on a tour of China, India, the US and Australia to set out British thinking and press home the central thesis of his review — that it will cost the world far more later if it does not spend money now to avert climate change. World emissions of greenhouse gases were the equivalent of 42 bn tonnes of carbon dioxide ...

We provide sufficient conditions for revenue maximization in a two-good monopoly where the buyer’s values for the items come from independent (but not necessarily identical) distributions over bounded intervals. Under certain distributional assumptions, we give exact, closed-form formulas for the prices and allocation rule of the optimal selling mechanism. As a side result we give the first exa...

Most people who have smoked for any signifi cant length of time would like to stop smoking. Findings from prospective studies examining the natural history of eff orts to stop smoking show that smokers often make frequent eff orts to stop smoking or reduce their consumption, with little long-term success. Findings also show that most attempts to stop smoking are unplanned and are typically made...

BACKGROUND This study examined associations between perceived neighborhood illicit drug selling, peer illicit drug disapproval and illicit drug use among a large nationally representative sample of U.S. high school seniors. METHODS Data come from Monitoring the Future (2007-2011), an annual cross-sectional survey of U.S. high school seniors. Students reported neighborhood illicit drug selling...

The amount of data available greatly increases every year and information can be quite valuable in the right hands. The existing mechanisms for selling goods, such as VCG, cannot handle sharable goods, such as information. To alleviate this limitation, in this paper, we study mechanisms for selling goods that can be shared or copied. We present and analyze theoretically and experimentally effic...

A Working Paper is the author's intellectual property. It is intended as a means to promote research to interested readers. Its content should not be copied or hosted on any server without written permission from [email protected] Find more INSEAD papers at We analyze two pricing mechanisms for information goods – selling, where an up-front payment allows unrestricted use by the consum...

This paper is concerned with a finite-horizon optimal selling rule problem when the underlying stock price movements are modeled by a Markov switching Lévy process. Assuming that the transaction fee of the selling operation is a function of the underlying stock price, the optimal selling rule can be obtained by solving an optimal stopping problem. The corresponding value function is shown to be...

BACKGROUND AND METHODOLOGY Community pharmacists' role in the sale and supply of emergency hormonal contraception (EHC) represents an opportunity to increase EHC availability and utilise pharmacists' expertise but little is known about pharmacists' attendant ethical concerns. Semi-structured qualitative interviews were undertaken with 23 UK pharmacists to explore their views and ethical concern...