New experiments in industrial organisation

Experimental economics has devoted much of its relatively short life to the study of issues of industrial organisation, and has achieved notable successes, of considerable value to the development of both the theoretical and empirical aspects of the subject. The general message emerging from the market-level experiments is that the existence of, and convergence to, the (market) equilibrium of neoclassical theory is, in general, well-supported by the experimental evidence; on the other hand, the general message emerging from the individual level experiments is that the foundations of the neoclassical market theories are seriously flawed. This paper argues for new types of experiments in industrial organisation, ones that are theory-suggesting rather than theory-testing, and ones that are more ill-defined than those carried out to date. There is a need to shed some light on how people tackle extremely complicated ill-defined problems as opposed to experiments confined to testing well-defined theories of simple problems with complicated solutions.I am particularly grateful to the ESRC, the Leverhulme Trust and the Fondazione Ivo Vanzi for financing the experiments discussed in this paper. I would also like to pay tribute to Patrizia Sbriglia, who has carried out much of the work on The Combination Race, and to Cristina Pitassi, who has worked with me on the Oligopoly Experiment discussed at the end of the paper. Finally, my especial thanks to Norman Spivey, for writing the software for two of the three experiments discussed here, and to Jo Hall for typing this paper faster than I could write it.     

The Austrian theory of relational goods

In modern rich societies, the traditional positive correlation between income and happiness seems to have disappeared: even though their income keeps rising, people do not declare themselves to be happier. This problem, which is known in literature as the “paradox of happiness”, has been thoroughly studied. One of the possible explanations is based on the observation that an income increase can sometimes entail the destruction of those relational goods on which happiness largely relies: relationships of family, friendship, love and fellowship. This research aims to show how, in the age of Marginalism, the most important attempt at establishing if and in which sense relational goods are economic goods is carried out by the very Austrian economists who led Robbins to write the epistemological statute of modern economic science.     

囚徒困境的均衡辨析

传统的 《博弈论》 分析最终结果是两个囚徒均会坦白，但这并不是两个囚徒的最好结局，如何才能达到最好结局？本文从 《博弈论》 中“理性人”的假设出发，对传统的 （坦白，坦白） 均衡提出质疑。本文指出理性人不会满足于传统的均衡，理性人会积极寻找双方利益最大化的均衡，并达到此均衡。本文给出了新的均衡：广义均衡，并给出广义均衡的求解过程。通过对引入公共支付函数的概念，公共支付函数表达了两个人的共同利益。通过公共支付函数的最大化，使两个囚徒公共利益最大化，以求得囚徒困境的新的均衡，让两个囚徒的结果达到最好———即两人均抵赖。本文还将公共支付函数运用于其他 《博弈论》 案例，并指出广义均衡比纳什均衡更具有社会意义，因为前者体现了公共利益。文中还对囚徒困境的机制设计问题做了分析，指出囚徒困境中机制的设计会诱导囚徒作出不正确的选择，从而没有达到双方利益的最大化。     

我国绿色产品开发的思考

目前,具有促进社会、经济可持续发展特征的绿色产品已经逐渐成为人们消费的时尚,在公众消费热情的推动下,企业也开始将发展绿色产业作为其获取经济利益的重要途径。本文将就绿色产品开发、生产的有关问题进行论述与分析,以期推动绿色产业的发展。     

Collective vs. individual lobbying

This paper presents a menu-auction model in which firms lobby the government to make an environmental regulation less burdensome. In this lobbying game, industrial interests are opposed by an environmental interest group. We compare political outcomes under two institutional arrangements. In the first, firms must join an organization that represents the interests of the industry. In the second, firms would lobby the government individually. The two arrangements result in strikingly different equilibrium outcomes. Only a small fraction of firms join the lobby group under collective lobbying, but all firms participate in lobbying activities when there is no such group. Thus, an attempt by firms to solve the apparent collective action problem through coordination would effectively backfire. The reason is that coordination among firms would increase the leverage available to the government, to demand high political contributions. We also evaluate the desirability of the two lobbying regimes from the private perspective of individual firms, and from the perspective of society as a whole. This permits us to evaluate possible restrictions on lobbying activities.     

Nudging Merit Goods: Conceptual,Normative, and Practical Connections

Abstract

Mainstream economics has traditionally maintained a respect for preferences and the choices that individuals make based on them. But recent advances in psychology and behavioral economics have led scholars and policy-maker to doubt if people make wise choices in their own interests. Based on this, libertarian paternalists endorse choice interventions—nudges—designed to steer people to decisions that will better promote their interests. However, the complex, multifaceted, and subjective nature of interests implies that policy-makers are imposing externally chosen interests for people’s own when designing nudges. In this sense, policy-makers are treating the interests they choose to advance like merit goods as described by Richard Musgrave, goals or ends that are explicitly judged by policy-makers to be worth advancing even if they are not ranked highly or chosen consistently by individuals themselves. This paper will make explicit the conceptual and normative connections between nudges and merit goods, arguing that nudges can be considered delivery mechanisms for merit goods, and recommending that libertarian paternalists abandon their claim to be advancing people’s true interests and instead adopt the objective theories of good used to justify merit goods.     

The stability of decision making in committees: The one-core

We study the stability of decision making in committees. A policy proposal introduced by a committee member is either adopted or abandoned in favor of a new proposal after deliberations. If a proposal is abandoned, it is in spite of the committee member who introduced it, who does not cooperate in any effort to defeat it. Shenoy (1980) proposes the one-core as a solution concept for this game, and shows that this solution may be empty. We provide a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of a stable policy under the majority rule. This result highlights a trade-off between the size of a committee, the number of competing policy options, and the existence of a stable outcome. Our findings imply a tension between political stability and the existence of a large number of competing interests in democracies.     

Pacifying monogamy

This paper proposes a theory of institutionally imposed monogamy. In a society where many women are allocated to the elite, there are high returns for the non-elite men to rebel. Monogamy, or “constrained” polygyny, can pacify non-elite men, and thus serve the elite’s reproductive interests. The more unequal is the society, the stricter constraints the elite want to impose on themselves. This suggests how monogamy might have arisen in response to rising class cleavages, e.g., in the wake of the introduction of agriculture. Another result is that, if the elite can write a law that commits not only themselves but also any group that would come to replace them in a rebellion, then polygyny will be more constrained than if they cannot. We speculate that the Church in Europe may have facilitated the imposition of such binding constraints.     

Fundamental Issues in Constitutional Reform: With Special Reference to Latin America and the United States

This article describes the kinds of democratic institutions that citizens might include in a constitution that they themselves wrote to advance their common interests. It argues that no single set of institutions dominates all others, but rather that there are advantages and disadvantages to different institutions and, most importantly, that different parts of the constitution can either reinforce or contradict one another. Frequent reference is made to the experience of Latin American countries in the interest of making the arguments more concrete. Many of the same issues are also relevant for the United States, however.     

Sorting equilibrium in a multi-jurisdiction model

This paper analyzes a general model of an economy with heterogeneous individuals choosing among two jurisdictions, such as towns or political parties. Each jurisdiction is described by its constitution, where a constitution is defined as a mapping from all possible population partitions into the (possibly multidimensional) policy space. This study is the first to establish sufficient conditions for existence of sorting equilibria in a two-jurisdiction model for a policy space of an arbitrary dimension.     

Pulling Econometrics Students Up by Their Bootstraps

Although the concept of the sampling distribution is at the core of much of what we do in econometrics, it is a concept that is often difficult for students to grasp. The thought process behind bootstrapping provides a way for students to conceptualize the sampling distribution in a way that is intuitive and visual. However, teaching students to write bootstrapping code on their own would come at great expense in terms of instruction time. The author proposes the use of instructor-written macros as a balance between these opposing interests, and he focuses on the use of the nonparametric “pairwise” bootstrap procedure in order to make an intuitive link between bootstrapping and sampling from a population (one of the first ideas students meet in statistics).     

Staying dry on Spanish wine: The rejection of the 1905 Spanish-Italian trade agreement

After a long debate on wine import tariffs, the Italian Parliament rejected the Spanish-Italian trade agreement on 17 December 1905. This decision left Spain and Italy without a bilateral trade treaty for an entire decade. In the literature, broader political issues and local interests are alternatively indicated as the main drivers of the rejection. Based on a new database which collects economic and political variables (including MPs personal features) and using a probit model, this paper provides a quantitative analysis of the vote. Results show that constituency interests had a role in determining the result of the vote on the trade treaty. Moreover, constituency interests were also important for the “vote switchers”, i.e. those MPs that supported the overall government policy stance in the first round, but opposed the Spanish-Italian trade agreement in the second.     

Financial risk attitudes and aging in Australia

A number of empirical studies document that people tend to become more risk averse as they get older. But other studies find only little evidence that age matters for financial risk attitudes. This prompts a call for revisiting the relationship between age and risk attitude to better support policy recommendations. The current paper contributes to this effort by utilising large-scale population data to conduct a dynamic panel analysis. Care is taken to avoid the problem of endogeneity of lagged risk attitude in modelling its effects. Analysis reveals that individuals' past risk attitude has a positive effect on their current risk attitude. However, there is only little evidence that risk attitude and age are systematically related. Our results shed some light on the previous contradictory empirical findings in the literature and suggest that past risk attitude is potentially of greater relevance than chronological age in determining current risk attitude.     

从湖湘文化看丁玲早年创作心态

丁玲无意走上创作之路,却成为中国现代特有的知名作家之一。她早年的小说《梦珂》、《莎菲女士的日记》、《阿毛姑娘》等作品的主人公都是女性,她们具有对传统男尊女卑的极端反叛的非常鲜明的特点。＂莎菲＂更是这一时期文学的典型代表,一时成为丁玲的代名词。这些作品闪烁着＂五四＂追求自由、民主的精神光芒,也充满湖湘文化敢为人先的精神。这些在男人世界中自强不息,奋斗不止的小说形象,正是作者的缩影,也是湖湘文化的精神体现。这与其一生坎坷不平,晚年政治化的心态也有着一定的联系。     

Reputation with equal discounting in repeated games with strictly conflicting interests

We analyze reputation effects in two-player repeated games of strictly conflicting interests. In such games, player 1 has a commitment action such that a best reply to it gives player 1 the highest individually rational payoff and player 2 the minmax payoff. Players have equal discount factors. With positive probability player 1 is a type who chooses the commitment action after every history. We show that player 1's payoff converges to the maximally feasible payoff when the discount factor converges to one. This contrasts with failures of reputation effects for equal discount factors that have been demonstrated in the literature.     

NATIONAL SECURITY AND INDUSTRIAL POLICY: THE NEED FOR A PUBLIC CHOICE PERSPECTIVE

This paper argues that the issues raised by the industrial policy debate are as much political as they are economic. There is every reason to believe that, without substantial reform of political institutions, efforts to administer a rational new industrial policy would soon degenerate into the type of inconsistent morass of special-interest-generated policies which industrial policy advocates rightfully criticize as our de facto set of industrial policies.
This important political dimension has been overlooked by many industrial policy advocates. An important exception is Robert Reich, who has proposed a new centralized industrial policy agency in hopes that the battle of conflicting interests would promote greater aggregate efficiency. We argue that on theoretical grounds, however, such centralization might either increase or decrease efficiency. The competition of the military services under the Defense Department gives us a close analogue for study. Unfortunately, however, our review of efficiency in defense policy suggests that this would be a very poor model on which to base a broader industrial policy. To promote substantial increases in defense and industrial policy efficiency appears to require that much more fundamental institutional reforms be considered.     

To be consumed with moderation

We study the optimal behavior of a hyperbolic discounting agent who has incomplete information about his own preferences and can only learn them through consumption. We show that, even if moderate current consumption and moderate future consumption always dominates abstinence, the agent may optimally decide not to consume as a commitment device against inefficient learning that would lead to future excesses. This provides a rationale for why smokers, gamblers or compulsive buyers stick to second-best personal rules of behavior - such as “abstinence” - without invoking standard habit formation arguments. We also study how urges modify the strategy of the individual.     

THE GOSPEL AND ECONOMIC BEHAVIOUR: EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE FROM A TRUST GAME

This paper studies how individual religiosity affects people's behaviour. In particular here I study the behaviour of the second players in a standard trust game. While the extant literature has looked for religiosity to increase the stakes passed by the subjects, the results presented here show that more religious people tend to choose an even allocation of these resources, whilst the less religious participants are either opportunistic or generous.     

Distributional preference in Japan

Using experiments developed by Engelmann and Strobel ( 2004 ), this study investigates distributional preference in Japan. We find that just over half the people in the study have a maximin preference, approximately 7 to 19% have an efficiency preference, approximately 8% have a self‐interest preference, and approximately 18% chose the allocation that would reduce the payoff to the rich and the poor, given that her/his payoff would remain constant. The last preference could be interpreted as what is referred to as “malice”, “deep envy” or a “feeling of vulnerability” in behavioural economics and cross‐cultural psychology.     

Global terrorism: deterrence versus pre-emption

Abstract .  This paper analyses two anti-terrorism policies when a targeted nation's people and property are in jeopardy at home and abroad. A country's deterrence decision involves both external benefits and costs as the terrorist threat is deflected, while its preemption decision typically gives external benefits when the threat is reduced for all potential targets. With damages limited to home interests, a country will overdeter, while, for globalized terror, a country will underdeter. Pre-emption is usually undersupplied. Leader-follower behaviour is apt to lessen inefficiency for deterrence, but worsen inefficiency for pre-emption, compared with simultaneous-choice equilibrium allocations. Targeted nations can never achieve the proper counterterrorism policy through leadership.