On the informational efficiency of the competitive resource allocation process

The purpose of this paper is to formalize the competitive process as a parametric process, and then prove the minimality of its message space among the message spaces for a broad class of parametric processes that includes the class of processes considered by Hurwicz (in “Studies in Resource Allocation Processes” (K. J. Arrow and L. Hurwicz, Eds.), pp. 413–423, Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, 1977), Mount and Reiter (J. Econ. Theory6 (1974), 161–192), and Osana (J. Econ. Theory17 (1978), 66–78). The proof of this result turns crucially on the “asymmetry property” (which is stronger than the well-known “uniqueness property” of Hurwicz) and on an injectiveness lemma which is applicable to parametric processes.     

THEORY AND PRACTICE OF DECENTRALIZED PLANNING PROCEDURES

Abstract. The paper surveys the theory of decentralized planning procedures, dealing with price-guided, quantity-guided and mixed procedures. Informational and incentive properties of the various procedures are dealt with, as is the problem of public goods. The practice of planning in the USSR, Hungary and India is also discussed.     

A core-theoretic solution for the design of cooperative agreements on transfrontier pollution

For a simple economic model of transfrontier pollution, widely used in theoretical studies of international treaties bearing on joint abatement, we offer in this paper a scheme for sharing national abatement costs through international financial transfers that is inspired by a classical solution concept from the theory of cooperative games—namely, the core of a game. The scheme has the following properties: total damage and abatement costs in all countries are minimized (optimality property), and no coalition or subset of countries can achieve lower total costs for its members by taking another course of action in terms of emissions or transfers, under some reasonable assumption about the reactions of those not in the coalition (core property). In the concluding section economic interpretations of the scheme are proposed, including its connection with the free-riding problem.     

International treaties on trade and global pollution

The paper shows that global pollution need not rise under free trade in goods and/or emissions even in the complete absence of income effects. Differences in environmental concerns across the countries lead to differences in the pollution intensity of production and, thus, generate the possibility of increasing world output and income without increasing the world pollution by shifting the production of the polluting good from the country with higher pollution intensity of production to the country with lower one. We show that free trade in goods and/or emissions can induce precisely such a shifting of production with the country with greater environmental concern exporting the polluting good. The paper also demonstrates the possibility of a first-best international treaty on global pollution in which each country or group of countries is better-off.     

Repetitive risk aversion

We propose a reasonable condition, which we call repetitive risk aversion (RRA), to be imposed on any utility function to account for the observed data on the relationship between the degree of absolute risk aversion and wealth. We deduce this condition from the concept of the fear of ruin (Aumann and Kurz 1977) and show it to be equivalent to the behaviorally meaningful condition that the risk premium is increasing at a non-increasing rate with the size of the bet. We drive mixed risk aversion, which is known to be stronger than standard and thus proper risk aversion, from RRA. We present several economic applications of RRA to demonstrate that it delivers better comparative static results.I am thankful to Jacques Drèze and Louis Eeckhoudt for their comments. I greatly appreciate the comments of an anonymous reviewer of this journal which have resulted in substantial improvement to both the content and presentation of the paper. An earlier version of this paper was presented at seminars at Brown, CORE, Hopkins, HKUST, Yale, and IMS     

The nonlinear input-output model

This paper develops a nonlinear input-output model in which the production functions can exhibit a mixture of returns to scale at the various stages of production. It is shown that the traditional properties of the linear input-output model can be replicated under an extremely plausible assumption, which we call the uniform dominant diagonal condition. On the basis of this assumption it is shown that the model satisfies a contraction property. This open up the possibility of using some quite powerful results from the contraction mapping theory, establishes the existence of solutions, efficient computational procedures, and leads to a rather transparent mathematical theory for the nonlinear input-output model.     

On certain type of Queues in series

Summary This paper studies the steady-state behaviour of a queueing system consisting of three servers S₁, S₂ and S₃ . Two types of units each requiring two phases of service arrive and form two queues Q₁ and Q₂ in-front of the two servers S₁ and S₂, respectively, which attend to their first phase of service in order of arrival. On completion of the first phase the units discharged from these servers from a single queue Q₃ in-front of S₃ for the phase 2 service. The various stochastic processes namely, the interrarrival times and the service times, have been assumed to be distributed exponentially. We derive for this queueing process an expression for the mean queue length and some particular cases thereof.     

The impact of the Multi-jurisdiction Disclosure System on audit fees of cross-listed Canadian firms

The Multi-jurisdiction Disclosure System (MJDS), a treaty between Canada and the United States (U.S.), was intended to facilitate the cross-listing of a firm's securities in the neighboring country. Under this system, eligible Canadian companies are allowed to use home-country documents to meet U.S. disclosure requirements and these documents are generally not reviewed by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). We posit that the single-reporting requirement and lower SEC scrutiny may result in lower audit fees for MJDS firms. Based on audit-fee disclosures mandated by the SEC rule-making authority granted by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, we find a negative association between audit fees paid by U.S. cross-listed Canadian companies and their use of the MJDS. This result suggests that the lower audit fees provide an economic incentive to use the MJDS. Thus, our study provides evidence that the implementation of the MJDS may help facilitate cross-border listings by reducing audit costs. Additionally, this study confirms, for Canadian firms, some of the audit-fee determinants reported in earlier studies.     

On material balances when there are capacity limitations

A method for the computation of a consistent set of material balances is proposed when there are capacity limitations in domestic production and exports, and it is related to certain planning practices in East European countries as reported by Montias. Although the computational procedure solves a linear programming problem, it has nothing to do with standard linear programming algorithms. Instead it is a direct generalization of the input-output type of balancing method.