A college athletics recruiting game to teach the economics of rent-seeking

The authors of this article describe an adaptation of the rent-seeking game by Goeree and Holt (1999) to the recruiting of athletes by NCAA Division I football and basketball teams. Students engage in an effort-based lottery, i.e., recruiting to sign a blue-chip prospect. The winner gets the prize—the player's marginal revenue product in excess of his grant in aid. Students recruit in three scenarios: by recruiting legally, by recruiting legally or with illegal bribes, and by offering wages to athletes in an auction. The authors demonstrate the game's use in a principles course, but it is easily adaptable to other courses. To aid instructors unfamiliar with sports and NCAA recruiting, they include a comprehensive lesson plan with suggested readings and multimedia.     

后奥运时期与北京经济可持续发展研究

随着奥运经济理论的不断丰富和完善,同时,体育产业在一国经济中发挥越来越要的作用,奥运经济以及由此而带来的对城市发展的影响已成为经济学领域的重要课题。采用文献资料法、逻辑归纳法等方法,以“后奥运”时期为文章的背景和切入点,为北京奥运会后经济的可持续发展提供了积极的、具有建设性的对策及建议。     

Unfolding Social Hierarchies

Consider a large population of finitely-lived agents organized into n different hierarchical levels. Every period, all those placed at each level are randomly matched to play a given symmetric game. Based on the resulting outcome, a ρ-fraction of agents who (within their own level) attain the highest payoffs are promoted upwards. On the other hand, newcomers replacing those who die every period enter at the lowest level and choose irreversibly the strategy to be played for the rest of their life. This choice is made, with some noise, by imitating one of the strategies adopted at the highest level.  In this setup, the unique long-run behavior of the system is fully characterized for the whole class of 2×2 coordination games and two alternative variations of the model. The results crucially depend on the key “institutional” parameters ρ and n. In particular, it is shown that inefficient behavior prevails in the long run (even when risk-dominated) if promotion is only mildly selective—high ρ—and the social system is quite hierarchical—large n. In a stylized manner, these parameter conditions may be viewed as reflecting a sort of institutional deficiency that impairs economic performance. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: C70, C72, C73, D72.     

军用电子设备结构设计方案有关问题探讨

军用电子设备的结构设计方案作为项目总体方案的重要组成部分,是设备研制过程中结构工程设计的依据.文中阐述了拟制结构设计方案的重要性,详细讨论了结构设计方案拟制的依据、内容和实施问题.     

Reinforcement-Based Adaptive Learning in Asymmetric Two-Person Bargaining with Incomplete Information

The sealed bidk-double auction is a mechanism used to structure bilateral bargaining under two-sided incomplete information. This mechanism is tested in two experiments in which subjects are asked to bargain repeatedly for 50 rounds with the same partner under conditions of information disparity favoring either the buyer (Condition BA) or seller (Condition SA). Qualitatively, the observed bid and offer functions are in agreement with the Bayesian linear equilibrium solution (LES) constructed by Chatterjee and Samuelson (1983). A trader favored by the information disparity, whether buyer or seller, receives a larger share of the realized gain from trade than the other trader. Comparison with previous results reported by Daniel, Seale, and Rapoport (1998), who used randomly matched rather than fixed pairs, shows that when reputation effects are present this advantage is significantly enhanced. A reinforcement-based learning model captures the major features of the offer and bid functions, accounting for most of the variability in the round-to-round individual decisions.     

Regional Planning of Wastewater Reuse for Irrigation and River Rehabilitation

Subject to a few agri‐environmental restrictions, municipal wastewater can be utilised for agricultural irrigation and river rehabilitation. This paper develops a single‐year Planning Model for a region in Israel which consists of a city and three potential wastewater consumers. The model incorporates, in one endogenous system, the economic, physical and biological relationships in the water–soil–plant–environment system and its objective is to maximise the regional social welfare. The model determines the optimal crop mix and the optimal allocation of the limited water and land resources among all potential users. Then, different allocation approaches from the concept of transferable utility games are applied to determine a reasonable and fair allocation of the additional net benefits which will be acceptable to all the players. The results support the collaboration among the economic entities and indicate economic and environmental advantages which can serve the decision‐makers.     

Robust rational turnout

We show that equilibria of a class of participation games (Palfrey and Rosenthal in Public Choice 41(1):7–53, 1983; Journal of Public Economics 24(2):171–193, 1984) exhibit minimal heterogeneity of behavior so that players’ mixed strategies are summarized by at most two probabilities. We then establish that, except for a finite set of common costs of participation, these games are regular. Thus, equilibria of these voting games are robust to general payoff perturbations and survive in nearby games of incomplete information. Thanks to participants of the 2006 MPSA conference for comments on an early version.     

Strategic Similarity and Emergent Conventions: Evidence from Similar Stag Hunt Games

This paper reports evidence on the origin of convention in laboratory cohorts confronting similar but not identical strategic situations repeatedly. The experiment preserves the action space of the game, while randomly perturbing the payoffs and scrambling the action labels in an effort to blunt the salience of retrospective selection principles. Hence, the similarity between stage games is reduced to certain strategic details, like efficiency, security, and risk dominance. Nevertheless, we do observe conventions emerging in half of the laboratory cohorts. When a convention emerges subjects's behavior conforms to the selection principles of efficiency rather than security or risk dominance. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: C72, C78, C92, D83.     

A generalization of Condorcet’s Jury Theorem to weighted voting games with many small voters

We extend Condorcet’s Jury Theorem (Essai sur l’application de l’analyse à la probabilité des décisions rendues à la pluralité des voix. De l’imprimerie royale, 1785) to weighted voting games with voters of two kinds: a fixed (possibly empty) set of ‘major’ voters with fixed weights, and an ever-increasing number of ‘minor’ voters, whose total weight is also fixed, but where each individual’s weight becomes negligible. As our main result, we obtain the limiting probability that the jury will arrive at the correct decision as a function of the competence of the few major players. As in Condorcet’s result the quota q = 1/2 is found to play a prominent role. I wish to thank Maurice Koster, Moshé Machover, Guillermo Owen and two anonymous referees for helpful comments.