On the Likelihood and Welfare Effects of "Stop–and–go" Policies

Baleiras and Santos (2000) show that "stop–and–go" policies may be inherent in the institutional set–up rather than result from the wrong timing of expansionary vs. contractionary policies or any form of players' irrationality. We use this set–up, involving ultrarational players and perfect foresight, to show that stop–and–go policies are more likely (in a statistical sense) than the opposite type of phenomenon. Moreover, it is shown that having the voters' and the business community's preferences concerning the cycle converge to the socially optimal cycle pattern may entail a welfare loss.     

Chaucer's Craft in Telling Philosophical Lessons in "The Manciple's Tale"

"The Manciple's Tale" is a beast fable. Chaucer is a genius both in designing creative plots and teaching philosophical lessons in this beast fable. Chaucer arranges the Manciple to tell the story and the Manciple lets the animals tell the truth. Chaucer combines two philosophical lessons and his creative plot together perfectly.     

Strategic Quality Decisions by Heterogeneously Informed Suppliers — The Role of "Noise Consumers"—

In a differentiated oligopoly market, it is often the case that consumers' ex post preferences over different product qualities depend upon the state of nature which is not yet observable to the consumers at the time of purchase. One of the most typical examples is a market for durable goods or long-term service contracts, where the state is indeed a future state which has not yet realised when the transaction is made. To analyse such situations, this paper models a two-stage game, in which multiple suppliers move first to choose the quality of their products based upon their idiosyncratic information about the state. Consumers then observe these products, update their beliefs about the state, and decide which products to purchase. Counterintuitively, suppliers' incentives to reveal their private information are higher when there is a fraction of consumers whose prior about the state is moderately inaccurate, than when every consumer has better prior information. Hence the presence of such "noise consumers" can make all consumers better off, even including noise consumers themselves.     

Moments of truncated <Emphasis Type="Italic">t</Emphasis> and <Emphasis Type="Italic">F</Emphasis> distributions

Truncated distributions commonly arise in economics and related areas, see, for example, Lee (Econ Lett 3:165–169, 1979), Lien (Econ Lett 19:243–247, 1985; Econ Lett 20:45–47, 1986), Burdett (Econ Lett 52:263–267, 1996), Sercu (Insur: Math and Econ 20:79–95, 1997), Abadir and Magdalinos (Econom Theory 18:1276–1287, 2002), and Horrace (J Econom 126:335–354, 2005). In this note, we consider the most commonly encountered truncated distributions with heavy tails: the truncated t distribution and the truncated F distribution. For each of these distributions, we derive explicit expressions for the moments and estimation procedures by the method of moments and the method of maximum likelihood. An application is illustrated to a popular data set in the econometric literature.      

On <Emphasis Type="Italic">Private Governance</Emphasis>

Edward Peter Stringham’s book Private Governance: Creating Order in Economic and Social Life (2015) is a compelling defense of the proposition that private governance is more widely used and more effective than most people think. Stringham looks to history to see how people solved problems of fraud and cheating without government intervention and provides example after compelling example to contradict the strong claim that a government or any third-party enforcer is necessary for voluntary exchange. While Stringham doesn’t take on the tough problem that private governance is not sufficient for its task, his book is intended to be the beginning, not the end, of thinking about private governance.     

AN ANNUAL CHAIN INDEX OF ITALY'S "REAL" PRODUCT, 1861–1989

The construction and application of a Paasche annual chain index to the Italian GDP figures between 1861 and 1989 is the subject of this article. Comparison with product at constant prices shows, except for war periods, a revaluation of GDP in favour of the annual chain index of around 0.10 percent. The most striking differences are concentrated into periods of marked changes in relative prices, and the new index modifies the temporal pattern of the growth trend by accentuating, without altering the periodization, cyclical fluctuations.     

A Revealed Preference Theory for Non-expected Utility on "Certain × Uncertain" Consumption Pairs

In this paper we consider a two-period decision problem, where the feasible set is the set of "certain × uncertain" consumption pairs. That is, the decision-maker chooses ( x , m ) in a feasible set, where x is a certain first-period consumption and m is a random second-period consumption, a Borel probability measure on the set of real numbers. The purpose of this paper is to present revealed preference theory for non-expected utility on "certain × uncertain" consumption pairs. We present necessary and sufficient conditions for the data to be consistent with some non-expected utility functions.
JEL Classification Numbers: D11, D81, D91     

DANGERS OF CAPITAL FORBEARANCE: THE CASE OF THE FSLIC AND "ZOMBIE" S&Ls

This paper portrays Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation (FSLIC) forbearance and congressional unwillingness to increase the FSLIC's human or capital resources to the size necessary to handle developing economic insolvencies as a joint policy crime that has served to bifurcate the savings and loan industry into the living and the living dead. As agents for the taxpayer, Congress and the FSLIC have assumed too much discretion and have chosen to exercise that discretion myopically. An agent has a duty to represent its principal's economic interests more effectively than this. The FSLIC's policy touchstone should be to negotiate and enforce the same kind of covenant provisions that a prudent private guarantor would require.     

Decreasing Impatience: A Criterion for Non‐stationary Time Preference and "Hyperbolic" Discounting

Despite recent interest in hyperbolic discounting, there has been little discussion of exactly what property of time preferences is instantiated by hyperbolic or quasi‐hyperbolic functional forms. The paper revives an earlier proposal in Prelec (1989) that the key property is Pratt–Arrow convexity of the log of the discount function, which corresponds to decreasing impatience(DI) at the level of preferences. DI provides a natural criterion for assessing the severity of departure from stationarity in that greater DI is equivalent to more choices of dominated options in two‐stage decision problems, as well as greater convexity of the log of the discount function. Inefficient choices may arise as intentional precommitments, or as unintended reversals of preference by “naïve” agents.     

"传承"与"永恒"

要成为“传承”的理由,“永恒”是唯一条件。如一墅一宅因纯美传承;珍宝美钻因罕有传承。“永恒”从来是我们在世间万物更迭中追求的永不落幕的篇章。2008年11月8日,一场难得的“稀世、永恒”赏鉴盛宴在合生帝景山庄揭开序幕。     

“Qrobot”＆“ifttt”

可以说。有了ifttt。Qrobot将再也不会只是个玩具。因为ifttt一脚把Qrobot蹋进了未来。     

超越“左”与“右”

2010年7月17日,四十余位来自不同学科领域的海内外学者在北大博雅国际会议中心聚会,以“别求新声——汪晖的学术世界与当代中国思想之进路”为题,召开了一次学术座谈会。会议共设立了四个议题：全球化视野下的中国问题、二十年来中国学术思想之变迁、思想论争与超越左右、当代学术生产与现实关注。     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">Resourceship</Emphasis>: An Austrian theory of mineral resources

Economists inside and outside of the Austrian-school tradition have formulated a subjectivist theory of mineral resources. While von Mises (1940) presented a rudimentary theory, institutionalist Zimmermann (1933 and after) provided an in-depth mind-centered approach distinct from the objective, neoclassical theory for minerals developed by Jevons (1865, 1866), Gray (1913), and Hotelling (1931). A full-fledged Austrian theory identifies the fixity/depletionism view of minerals as incompatible with entrepreneurship. Mineral resourceship, praxeologically akin to manufacturing, or the making of capital goods, demotes the distinction between depletable and nondepletable resources for the sciences of human action. Instead of nonreproducibility, the interplay of geography and institutions becomes the locus of mineral-resource theory, given the nonuniform distribution of deposits. An Austrian-institutional theory is more robust for explaining changes in mineral-resource scarcity than neoclassical depletionism, and offers a wide research agenda for current debates over resource production, usage, and future availability.