Going out of the Great Recession? Contrast between the United States and Europe: Proposed work from economic history, 1960–2014

In recent work, the authors have proposed to the United States a model that explains the trend behavior of the rate of profit from share surplus, capital productivity, and the coefficient of financialization. The main results of the explanatory model allow the authors to affirm that with the change of control of Keynesianism to neoliberalism since 1980, there has been a substantial fall in the profit rate to half the values achieved in the years of Keynesian regulation (1945–1973). This significant fall in the level of benefits is due to a substantial fall in capital productivity. The authors are currently working on adapting the explanatory model for the U.S. economy to the main countries of the European Union (Germany, France, Italy, United Kingdom, and Spain). The results show that the pattern of behavior of the variables described in the reference country—the world capitalist economic system, the United States—is repeated more or less precisely in the main countries of the European Union; Germany, France, Italy, United Kingdom, and Spain.     

A note on undominated Bertrand equilibria

This note shows that the conventional outcome associated with Bertrand competition with homogenous products and different marginal costs is obtained in every Nash equilibrium in which firms use undominated strategies. This strengthens an existence result due to Blume (2003).     

Dictatorial domains

Summary. In this paper, we introduce the notion of a linked domain and prove that a non-manipulable social choice function defined on such a domain must be dictatorial. This result not only generalizes the Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem but also demonstrates that the equivalence between dictatorship and non-manipulability is far more robust than suggested by that theorem. We provide an application of this result in a particular model of voting. We also provide a necessary condition for a domain to be dictatorial and use it to characterize dictatorial domains in the cases where the number of alternatives is three. Received: July 12, 2000; revised version: March 21, 2002 RID="*" ID="*" The authors would like to thank two anonymous referees for their detailed comments. Correspondence to: A. Sen     

Action-Graph Games

Representing and reasoning with games becomes difficult once they involve large numbers of actions and players, because the space requirement for utility functions can grow unmanageably. Action-Graph Games (AGGs) are a fully-expressive game representation that can compactly express utility functions with structure such as context-specific independence, anonymity, and additivity. We show that AGGs can be used to compactly represent all games that are compact when represented as graphical games, symmetric games, anonymous games, congestion games, and polymatrix games, as well as games that require exponential space under all of these existing representations. We give a polynomial-time algorithm for computing a player's expected utility under an arbitrary mixed-strategy profile, and show how to use this algorithm to achieve exponential speedups of existing methods for computing sample Nash equilibria. We present results of experiments showing that using AGGs leads to a dramatic increase in the size of games accessible to computational analysis.²     

Environmental Degradation and Population Movements: The Role of Property Rights

This study examines the linkages between environmental degradation (viewed primarily as deforestation and land degradation) and the movement of population from one region to another within a developing country. The hypothesis postulated is that the link between population and environmental degradation is mediated by the nature of property rights in land. This hypothesis is examined with the help of two alternative methodologies. Firstly, a simultaneous equations model using data for the arid and semi-arid region of Western India illustrates that outmigration from the region is largely the consequence of push factors such as environmental degradation and decrease in common land. Alternatively, micro experiments in environmental protection and the creation of common property rights on open access land in the same region indicate that the association between migrational change, creation of common property rights and participation indices is high. It can be concluded that once property rights are well defined with the help of appropriate institutional arrangements, labour moves towards the creation of common assets and an improvement in the environment takes place. Out migration is prevented and higher levels of population are supported by the same resources. The authors wish to thank Ms. Seema Bathla and Dr. Suresh Sharma for assistance in documentation, data collection and analysis.