ZEW Discussion Papers

We investigate how buyer-supplier communication affects procurement prices, comparing auctions without direct communication to negotiations allowing it. In controlled experiments involving students and…

We investigate profit-share auctions in a procurement context,comparing them with traditional cash auctions to identify which mechanism yields lower expenses for buyers. We also explore whether specifying a high…

We examine the strategic considerations and effects of product placement services in digital content aggregators, focusing in particular on Spotify’s “Discovery Mode”. Discovery Mode introduces bias in users’…

Past studies have successfully shown that the level of anonymisation of scientific use files (SUF) is sufficiently high to protect against disclosure attacks that use data from traditional firm databases.…

Why do US college-educated couples with children marry at higher rates than those without a college degree? We argue that investing in children is more valuable for college-educated couples, who are more likely…

Digital therapeutics are increasingly used to complement traditional health care. In a pioneering move, Germany became the first country to introduce a structured regulatory framework — known as the DiGA scheme…

We show that the widespread approach to estimate the career costs of motherhood – socalled “child penalties” – is prone to produce biased results, as it pools first-time mothers of all ages without accounting…

Climate change can cause major challenges for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). Responding and adapting to such challenges is crucial, as SMEs are vital for driving economic growth and employment in…

During the post-pandemic inflation surge, many central banks actively used communication about the inflation outlook as a policy tool to limit spillovers from realized to expected inflation. We present novel…