This paper develops a contest model of a professional sports league in which clubs maximize a weighted sum of profits and wins (utility maximization). The model analyzes how more win-orientated behavior of certain clubs affects talent investments, competitive balance and club profits. Moreover, in contrast to traditional models, we show that revenue sharing does not always reduce investment inc...

Recently, “platform ecosystem” has received attention as a key business concept. Sustainable growth of platform ecosystems is enabled by platform users supplying and/or demanding content from each other: e.g. Facebook, YouTube or Twitter. The importance and value of user data in platform ecosystems is accentuated since platform owners use and sell the data for their business. Serious concern is...

States producing gas and oil have long levied severance taxes at the point of extraction, commonly placing most revenues into general funds. These taxes have assumed new meaning in many states amid the expansion of gas and oil production accompanying the advent of hydraulic fracturing. We reviewed all major statutes and constitutional amendments related to severance taxes that were enacted at t...

As vehicles become more fuel-efficient and overall levels of travel stagnate in response to increases in fuel prices, conventional sources of revenue for transportation finance such as taxes on motor fuels have been put under increasing pressure. One potential replacement as a source of revenue is a set of policies collectively referred to as value capture policies. In contrast to fuel taxes an...

Major airlines are selling increasing numbers of interline itineraries, in which flights operated by two or more airlines are combined and sold together. One reason for this increase is the rapid growth of airline alliances, which promote the purchase of interline itineraries and therefore virtually extend the reach of each alliance member’s network. This practice, however, creates a difficult ...

Might foreign aid and oil revenues have similar effects on political regimes? Drawing upon formal modeling, cross-national statistical analysis, and in-depth case studies, my dissertation explores the relationship between patterns of government revenue generation and political regime stability. Existing research has devoted surprisingly limited attention to variations in the sources of governme...

Along with substantial progress made recently in designing near-optimal mechanisms for multiitem auctions, interesting structural questions have also been raised and studied. In particular, is it true that the seller can always extract more revenue from a market where the buyers value the items higher than another market? In this paper we obtain such a revenue monotonicity result in a general s...

In combinatorial auctions using VCG, a seller can sometimes increase revenue by dropping bidders. In this paper we investigate the extent to which this counter-intuitive phenomenon can also occur under other deterministic dominant-strategy combinatorial auction mechanisms. Our main result is that such failures of “revenue monotonicity” can occur under any such mechanism that is weakly maximal—m...

The paper examines government IT outsourcing polices. The paper critiques the concept of ‘the Contract State’, and suggests how more disciplined uses of outsourcing can assist the creation of public value, more broadly conceived. Within the context of international developments, we study the United Kingdom Inland Revenue (IR), Customs and Excise (HMRC) and Department of Social Security (DSS) an...

Daily-deal business model is a type of performance-based advertising wherein a publisher provides advertising space to a merchant who pays a proportion of revenue generated on the website to the publisher. We develop a two-period model to capture the strategic interaction between a publisher and a merchant where consumers are heterogeneous in their willingness to pay for quality and awareness a...