Bargaining over effort

Employment contracts generally specify both the reward for labour and the conditions of employment. Although it is clear how unions affect the payment received by workers, the effect of unions upon working conditions, particularly the contracted effort level that must be supplied, is not so well-understood. This note analyses the generalised Nash bargain between a union and a firm over employment level and effort level. Under standard assumptions, it is shown that an increase in union power always leads to a reduction in the agreed effort level. The effect upon employment is dependent upon whether the firm has the ‘right-to-manage’.     

Quality Bargaining and Intermediate Goods Protection*

This paper offers an explanation for the proposition that removing protection from a firm can induce an improvement in product quality. In a vertically separated industry the quality of the final good is dependent on the quality of the intermediate goods used in its production. This model is used to consider removal of protection from the upstream firm (the supplier) which gives the downstream firm (the assembler) greater bargaining power since the option of turning to a foreign supplier becomes more attractive.     

Multiperson Bargaining over Two Alternatives

We present a continuous-time model of multiperson bargaining with incomplete information, where only two agreements are possible. We show that under mild informational assumptions, players behave as if they were representing the other players who prefer the same alternative, individually playing a war-of-attrition against a conglomerate player of the opposite side. We also provide a characterization of the perfect Bayesian equilibria in undominated strategies of the game, which yields a unique outcome in most cases.Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Numbers: C72, C78, D72, D74.     

作为公共品的组织

组织是一种特别的公共品。如果能够使不同成员的边际贡献与他们从组织中得到的边际收益相等,那么组织就实现了均衡。由于成员的边际贡献难以测度,因此只有通过实施“一报还一报”的策略才能激励成员实现组织的共容利益。     

Decentralizing Public Goods Production

Decentralized decisions, to a bureau with a given budget, about the production of public goods is analyzed within a general equilibrium model with a representative agent and no pure profits. Contrary to previous results on decentralization it is shown that sequential decentralization (i) does not necessarily imply aggregate production efficiency and (ii) need not be optimal even if all public goods are neutral. Also, cost‐benefit criteria are derived and the marginal cost of public funds is characterized.     

Bargaining over loan contracts with signaling

This paper combines a sequential bargaining game between an enterprise and a fixed number of banks with a signaling game through which the enterprise reveals her project quality as well as her market-speed on the lending market. We characterize subgame-perfect Nash equilibrium loan contracts that are supported by separating perfect Bayesian equilibria in the signaling game. In contrast to existing models of lending markets, low-quality investment projects might be rewarded with more favorable equilibrium loan contracts than high-quality projects. Also in contrast to existing models, an increase in the competitive pressure between banks reduces the aggregate welfare in our model. The reason is that more favorable loan conditions come with a greater incentive for the ‘strong’ entrepreneur to distinguish herself from her ‘weak’ counterpart through socially wasteful signaling costs.     

Public Versus Private Provision of Public Goods

It is well known that public goods are underprovided in a static setting with voluntary contributions. Public provision—in a median voter framework with proportional taxation—generally exceeds private provision. This paper compares private and public provision of public goods in a dynamic setting. In a dynamic setting, voluntary donations can result in efficient provision. Also, majority‐rule solutions exist even when taxes are not proportional to income. At low discount factors, public provision tends to exceed private provision. As patience increases, however, private provision may exceed public provision. This occurs because many outcomes with a low level of public good provision—and potentially large targeted transfer payments to particular individuals—become sustainable under public provision. Under private provision, however, large targeted transfers are unsustainable. To finance the public good, private provision tends to result in benefit taxation, and public provision tends to result in progressive taxation.     

Bargaining over a Menu of Wage Contracts

We investigate an infinite horizon bargaining problem in which a firm and a worker bargain over two dimensions, quality and wage. The worker has private information about his type. Only the uninformed firm makes an offer and it can offer a menu of quality-wage contracts instead of single one. We show that for all discount factors, the unique sequential equilibrium outcome is separating without delay; the firm separates the types of worker with a menu of contracts in the first period. Our result shows that in multi-dimensional bargaining, the "Coase Conjecture" holds in the sense that the game ends in the first period. But it fails in the sense that the uninformed party can preserve the entire bargaining power.     

The Evolutionary Stability of Auctions over Bargaining

This paper considers equilibrium in transaction mechanisms. In an environment with homogeneous buyers and sellers, which eliminates the advantage auctions possess of matching buyers and sellers, both auctions and bargaining are equilibria. However, only auctions are evolutionarily stable. This identifies a new advantage of auctions over bargaining, arising from the division of the gains from trade.Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Numbers: C78, C73, D44.     

Trade Gains and Public Goods

This paper proves that in a multicountry general‐equilibrium model of international trade with local public goods, free trade is beneficial if the governments in the trading world behave strategically with respect to the provision of public goods.     

Threatened Species as Public Goods and Public Bads

This paper discusses Pareto efficient allocations of an environmental commodity, which is both a public good and a public bad, with an application to the Scandinavian problem of conserving wild predators that are killing semi-domesticated reindeer. The paper begins by briefly outlining this conflict. This is followed by a theoretical analysis employing a diagrammatic tool called the Kolm triangle, which is an analogue of an Edgeworth box in an economy with a public good. Bargaining, Pareto improving reallocations and the shape of the Pareto set are discussed, using a simple model, where one of the agents is involountarily contributing to a public good. The paper concludes with an analysis of income-loss compensations and incentives for illegal hunting of predators.     

Political Representation and Legislative Bargaining over Redistribution

International Advances in Economic Research - The theories of dynamic legislative bargaining have supposed that the distribution of legislators are constant across periods. In reality, a transition...     

Bargaining over Interconnection: The Clear-Telecom Dispute

We explore the problem of network interconnection in local telecommunications. We develop a model with a competitive business sector and a regulated residential sector. The model is used to analyze the celebrated New Zealand antitrust case between Clear and Telecom. We discuss implications of the model for the economics of antitrust, including issues of competition versus efficiency and the use of appropriate economic models. We also examine the implications of some proposed rules for interconnection. In particular, we examine reciprocity, 'bill and keep', and the rule that the courts ultimately endorsed, the Baumol-Willig rule.     

Framing Effects in Public Goods Experiments

Three effects of apparently superficial changes in presentation (framing effects in a broad sense), were replicated together in the same repeated linear public goods experiment with real financial incentives. First, 32 repetitions were presented as four phases of 8 repetitions with a break and results summary in between. Contribution levels decayed during each phase but then persistently returned to about 50% after each re-start. Second, subjects contributed more when the payoff function was decomposed in terms of a gift which is multiplied and distributed to the other players, rather than the equivalent public good from which everyone benefits. Third, subjects contributed more following a comprehension task which asks them to calculate the benefits to the group of various actions (the We frame), rather than the benefits to themselves (the I frame). These results suggest that aspects of presentation may have strong and replicable effects on experimental findings, even when care is taken to make the language and presentation of instructions as neutral as possible. Experimental economists should therefore give careful consideration to potential framing effects—or, better still, explicitly test for them—before making claims about the external validity of results.     

公共产品与版权保护

公共产品的排他性与竞争性并非纯粹的物理属性,而是在很大程度上取决于法律规定和制度设计。就作品而言,复制与传播技术的发展不仅改变了其公共产品属性,而且促成了版权法的产生、变革与发展。版权法必须根据作品公共产品属性的强弱设计排他规则,为私人提供作品创造激励、预设条件。     

采矿业繁荣与公共品提供

资源型地区的财政收入高度依赖于采矿业,地方政府对财政资金的有效利用是提升居民福利水平和促进经济社会发展的必要条件.本文从财政收入获取形式影响地方政府行为激励的角度,分析了采矿业繁荣恶化地方公共品提供的机制.然后,文章基于1998-2018年中国地级市层面数据,利用国际矿产资源价格变动作为外生冲击,对采矿业繁荣影响地方公共品提供进行实证检验.结果 表明,采矿业繁荣尽管大幅度增加了地方财政收入,但是教育、医疗等民生性公共品供给水平并未因此而提升,基础设施等生产性公共品供给也未因此而改善.进一步研究发现,采矿业繁荣期,财政供养人员数量显著膨胀、财政资金使用效率降低,因而高速增长的财政收入并未有效转化为公共品供给.本文的结论表明,应该强化资源型地区财政资金使用的监督约束机制,提高财政资金使用效率.     

农村公共产品供给问题研究

农村的经济发展已经取得了举世瞩目的成就,国家越来越关注“三农”问题,但是在农村公共产品的供给问题上障碍重重,着实提高农村公共产品的建设质量已经成为民生的大事。农村公共产品供给影响着农民生活的各个方面,也对国家的经济发展有着非常重要的影响,本文从农村公共产品的含义入手,分析了当前存在的问题,并提出了解决措施。     

公共物品与政府职能

公共物品是独立于私人物品和商品之外的,其生产和消费不能以市场方式解决的一种特殊物品或环境,是社会和个人生活的可能性和必要性条件.加深对公共物品的认识和研究不仅对现代公共经济学理论的发展具有开拓性意义,而且对我们进一步认识市场的局限性、科学界定政府职能和防止政府职能异化都具有重要意义.     

公共产品提供的逻辑

从市场失效推导出来的公共产品理论不能有效地区分公共与私人产品,也不能解释公共提供的事实。本文试图从另一个角度讨论什么是决定产品公共提供的根本原因,并以外部性—效用相互依存性—公共提供这样的顺序来推导公共产品提供的逻辑。