Double Moral Hazard,Monitoring, and the Nature of Contracts

generalized double-sided moral-hazard model, with risk-averse parties who mutually monitor each other (to get a reasonable idea of outcome/effort). The model considers trade-off between monitoring costs and moral hazard costs, which are endogenously determined by the extent of monitoring. Using this model, we formally prove a generalized version of Coase's conjecture – that the optimal contract minimizes the agency and risk costs. We then show how varying assumptions about the feasibility or cost of monitoring of the outcome or the worker's effort lead to different contracts being optimal. The analysis is then used to explain the nature of contracts observed in practice under many different situations. We will give an explanation as to why industrial workers typically work under wage contracts, while share contracts are common in agriculture and will explain why profit sharing is more common for senior managers than for the production workers. Received September 19, 2000; revised version received October 30, 1997     

A strategic market game with seigniorage costs of Fiat money

Summary. A model that includes the cost of producing money is presented and the nature of the inefficient equilibria in the model are examined. It is suggested that if one acknowledges that transactions are a form of production, which requires the consumption of resources, then the concept of Pareto optimality is inappropriate for assessing efficiency. Instead it becomes necessary to provide an appropriate comparative analysis of alternative transactions mechanisms in the appropriate context. Received: September 5, 2000; revised version: May 3, 2001     

Winner-take-all price competition

Summary. We analyze an oligopoly model of homogeneous product price competition that allows for discontinuities in demand and/or costs. Conditions under which only zero profit equilibrium outcomes obtain in such settings are provided. We then illustrate through a series of examples that the conditions provided are “tight” in the sense that their relaxation leads to positive profit outcomes. Received: April 7, 2000; revised version: September 14, 2000     

企业高技能型人才培养机制构建新探

随着科学技术的高速发展,我国工业企业高技能型人才出现了严重的短缺现象,应引起有关部门及企业界人士的高度重视.培养大批高级专业技术人才与高级技工人才有利于增强企业的竞争能力,应针对高技能型人才的目前状况,确定相应的培养途径和措施.     

规划理论和实践中的空间观念辨析

规划理论和实践中的空间观念塑造着我们周围的人造环境。空间观念的发展呈现出从绝对到相对、从时空分离转向时空关联、从一元到多元的变化趋势。20世纪以来规划理论逐渐吸纳相对空间观念,但迄今为止规划实践仍以绝对空间观念为主导。绝对空间观念成为规划实践低效性的深层原因,但是完全放弃绝对空间观念而将相对空间观念引入规划理论和实践不仅存在很多困难,而且会造成认识和实践上的混乱,科学的空间观念应该将绝对和相对结合起来形成多元空间观。我国规划理论研究和实践仍以绝对空间观念为主导,了解绝对空间观念的不足和吸纳相对空间观念的合理性具有重要的理论和实践意义。     

科研开发与经济增长——兼论科研开发的溢出效应

经济划分为科研部门和非科研部门，科研开发对经济增长的作用及科研对非科研部门具有外溢效应。1999-2003年30个省市自治区的面板数据表明，科研开发对经济增长具有较大的拉动作用，同时科研开发部门对其他部门的外溢作用明显为正。     

农业高新技术投资项目风险评价

The agricultural high-teeh investment project （AHIP） is eharaeterized by technology-intensive, high risk and great profit. This article analyzes essential factors of the risks of the agricultural high-tech investment projects and the traditional risk evaluation method of agrtcultral projects. We think that the applications of the sensitivity, analysis and probability ore defer. Therefore; this article introduces a structural model to evaluate the risks of the agricultural high-tech investment projects and the system of the concrete evaluation indexes.     

Strategic freedom, constraint, and symmetry in one-period markets with cash and credit payment

Summary. In order to explain in a systematic way why certain combinations of market, financial, and legal structures may be intrinsic to certain capabilities to exchange real goods, we introduce criteria for abstracting the qualitative functions of markets. The criteria involve the number of strategic freedoms the combined institutions, considered as formalized strategic games, present to traders, the constraints they impose, and the symmetry with which those constraints are applied to the traders. We pay particular attention to what is required to make these strategic market games well-defined, and to make various solutions computable by the agents within the bounds on information and control they are assumed to have. As an application of these criteria, we present a complete taxonomy of the minimal one-period exchange economies with symmetric information and inside money. A natural hierarchy of market forms is observed to emerge, in which institutionally simpler markets are often found to be more suitable to fewer and less-diversified traders, while the institutionally richer markets only become functional as the size and diversity of their users gets large.Received: 5 June 2003, Revised: 18 November 2003, JEL Classification Numbers: C7, G10, G20, L10, D40, D50. Correspondence to: Eric SmithEric Smith, Martin Shubik: We are grateful to Lloyd Shapley, Duncan Foley, and Doyne Farmer for discussions in the course of this work.     

Herd Behaviour in Adoption of Network Technologies

In technology adoption, herd behaviour can lead to a suboptimal outcome as shown, among others, by Choi (1997). However, empirics find little support for the idea that a less efficient technology can conquer the market and lock out a more efficient one. Accordingly, we improve and generalize Choi's results, by introducing an additional source of uncertainty: the economic environment. We investigate how the economic environment can affect herding and consequently the efficiency of the technology choice. The result is a smaller adoption bias. In the limit, firms may optimally experiment with the new technology that turns out to be social welfare improving.     

Trade and Renewable Resources in a Second Best World: An Overview

We provide an overview and introduction to the emerging field of trade and renewable resources, and discuss the potential impact of trade liberalization on welfare and resource conservation. A key factor determining the effect of trade reform is the institutional context or property rights regime, and our survey is organized such that it loosely follows the development of new insights with respect to institutions in this literature. This implies a transition from the benevolent planners model to the polar opposite benchmark of open access in the 1990s. Currently the pendulum is swinging back towards management and regulation, but institutions are treated as endogenous. We discuss and compare various key models in some detail and search for common ground between protagonists and antagonists of free trade. Paper based on Keynote address by Erwin Bulte, 12th Annual Conference of the European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, Bilbao (Spain), June 28–30, 2003.