Equilibria in large economies with a separable Banach commodity space and non-ordered preferences

The purpose of this paper is to provide an existence result of equilibria for economies with a measure space of agents, a non-trivial production sector and an infinite dimensional commodity space. The commodity space is modeled by an ordered separable Banach space whose positive cone has a non-empty interior. The discretization approach proposed in this paper, allows us to extend the existence results in Khan and Yannelis [Equilibrium in markets with a continuum of agents and commodities. In: Khan, M.A., Yannelis, N.C. (Eds.), Equilibrium Theory in Infinite Dimensional Spaces. Springer, Berlin, 1991] and Podczeck [Economic Theory 9 (1997) 585] to economies with a non-trivial production sector and with possibly non-ordered but convex preferences as well as partially ordered (possibly incomplete) but non-convex preferences.     

Nash-equilibria in a heterogeneous oligopoly with fuzzy information

We consider a model of an oligopolistic market with heterogeneous firms and products where neither the cost nor the demand functions are common knowledge. Instead, each firm only has some vague ideas about the price strategies adopted by its competitors which is modelled by a fuzzy set. In analogy to the notion of an "equilibrium of actions and beliefs" we define and characterize a generalized Nash-equilibrium and show its existence under general conditions. Furthermore, the impact of the fuzzy information on the equilibrium outcome is analyzed by means of a comparative static analysis within a particular model framework.Received: 28 May 2002, Accepted: 25 December 2002, JEL Classification: D43, D80, L13We wish to thank Bernhard F. Arnold, the editor Murat Sertel , and two anonymous referees for helpful comments. Of course, we are responsible for all remaining errors.     

Overlapping Generations or Infinitely-Lived Agents: Intergenerational Altruism and the Economics of Global Warming

Do we need an overlapping generations model for the economics of global warming? To answer this question, an infinitely-lived agent (ILA) approach and an overlapping generations (OLG) model are contrasted. ILA and OLG can be viewed as polar representations of intergenerational altruism. With ILA an immortal agent acts through his investment/savings decisions as trustee on the behalf of the future generations. With OLG, agents need not behave altruistic. They simply save during working years and dissave completely during retirement. Nevertheless, ILA and OLG must not differ in their implication for greenhouse policy. Greenhouse gas abatement is a straightforward alternative to physical capital formation and, even without altruism, each age cohort has an incentive to provide current abatement in order to reduce future damages attributable to climate change. Indeed, under reasonable assumptions and parameter values, our simulations reveal such an invariance result. Provided carbon taxes are the only policy tool and tax revenues are recycled through socially mandated rules, projections of economic growth, climate change and energy consumption are only insignificantly affected by the choice of approach.     

Mass-Elite Equilibrium of Federal Constitutional Legitimacy

William Riker ((1964) Federalism: Origin, Operation, Significance. Boston: Little Brown) stressed the problem of the contested nature of federal institutions and argued that federations existed amidst the ongoing challenge to their rules, that federal institutions were being continuously endogenously produced in the interaction of political parties rather than serving as self-enforceable constraints on the political process. As parties changed, so did federalism, and eventually the balance was bound to shift to either one or the other extreme as far as the degree of centralization was concerned. An alternative approach to essentially the same problem of federal instability was to conceptualize the underlying game differently, as a game of coordination, so that institutions would be accepted as constraints and would therefore be self-enforceable because they allow the players to avoid the chaos and successfully converge to an outcome with payoffs exceeding their reservation values (Hardin, 1989, Ordeshook, 1992). The third proposed solution, consociationalism, emphasizes the elite effort to overcome the conflictual nature of the institutional choice (Lijphart, 1977). Here, as in the coordination argument, the hope is that one could create incentives for politicians to view the existing rules as advantageous and to avoid redistribution by means of the institutional revision. Yet, just like the coordination argument, it is based on an implicit assumption that politicians are more easily motivated to act “cooperatively” than are their constituencies. The missing step in the literature is the mechanism by which this more or less “cooperative” behavior of elected politicians could be sustainable in the environment of popular accountability. An essential component in building the theory of institutional design is to show the possibility in a democracy of elected politicians cooperating on institutional matters even when each of their constituencies would prefer to adjust the constitutional terms to its own advantage. Elite “cooperativeness” must be sustainable even in the presence of outside challengers promising to stay closer to the constituent preferences. Here, I present a model of mass-elite equilibrium of constitutional legitimacy, which demonstrates the possibility to motivate the incumbents to sustain the institutional stability while at the same time protecting them from electoral defeat. I also discuss the difficulties and limitations that such a solution faces, in particular, in plural societies. JEL classification: H77, D02 In working on this paper, I have benefited from the discussions with Mikhail Filippov, Peter Ordeshook, Charles Kromkowski, Carol Mershon, and from the comments of the participants of the conference on ‘‘Micro-Foundations of Federal Institutional Stability’’ at the MicroIncentives Research Center at Duke University, Durham, NC, April 30–May 1, 2004, and of the Lansing Lee proseminar at the University of Virginia. The responsibility for the many remaining flaws is solely mine.     

Outsourcing, Imports and Labour Demand

This paper examines the effects of purchased services and imported intermediate materials on the labour demand for different skills in German manufacturing sectors. We derive and estimate a factor demand system based on the generalised Box–Cox cost function nesting both the normalised quadratic and the translog functional form. We find that the impacts of output and capital growth are more important in explaining the demand for heterogeneous labour than substitution effects between labour and non–labour inputs. Similarly, the increasing use of both imported materials and purchased services is a consequence of output growth rather than input substitution.
JEL classification : J 23; O 33     

Existence of a competitive equilibrium in a one sector growth model with heterogeneous agents and irreversible investment

Summary. We prove existence of a competitive equilibrium in a version of a Ramsey (one sector) model in which agents are heterogeneous and gross investment is constrained to be non negative. We do so by converting the infinite-dimensional fixed point problem stated in terms of prices and commodities into a finite-dimensional Negishi problem involving individual weights in a social value function. This method allows us to obtain detailed results concerning the properties of competitive equilibria. Because of the simplicity of the techniques utilized our approach is amenable to be adapted by practitioners in analogous problems often studied in macroeconomics. Received: September 13, 2001; revised version: December 9, 2002 RID="*" ID="*" We are grateful to Tapan Mitra for pointing out errors as well as making very valuable suggestions. Thanks are due to Raouf Boucekkine and Jorge Duran for additional helpful discussions. We also thank an anonymous referee for his/her helpful comments. The second author acknowledges the financial support of the Belgian Ministry of Scientific Research (Grant ARC 99/04-235 “Growth and incentive design”) and of the Belgian Federal Goverment (Grant PAI P5/10, “Equilibrium theory and optimization for public policy and industry regulation”). Correspondence to: C. Le Van     

基于演化博弈论的知识联盟动态复杂性分析

知识联盟是企业间为共同创造知识和进行知识共享而建立的联盟。本文从演化博弈论的角度，探讨了进行知识联盟的企业交互活动的复杂性可能对异质知识流的扩散和知识联盟稳定性造成多重可能结果。分析表明：一个企业实施知识流的更新（如建立知识联盟）和顺利扩散，取决于不同因素的作用，并表现出不同的复杂演化结果。对于已建立知识联盟的企业来说。这些不同的结果会对知识联盟的稳定性产生影响。如果企业最终都达到主动变流知识的策略选择状态，则异质知识得以在企业间扩散，从而强化企业间的知识联盟，但如果企业最终没有达到这一状态，则企业知识联盟的稳定性将被削弱。     

企业多元化的新模式：基于核心能力的虚拟经营

本文研究了企业多元化经营的科学含义，创建了一个二元作用定性模型来论证企业发展到一定阶段多元化经营的必然性，研究了现代企业虚拟经营的背景，含义以及企业深化，培育核心能力与开展虚拟经营之间的本质联系，考察了多元化成功与失败的众多企业案例，当代多元化经营成功的企业大多是基于核心能力的战略相关多元化，而虚拟经营也是核心能力培育，深化的产物，借助于基于核心能力的虚拟经营以实现相关多元化发展，是企业多元化的一条新途径，相对于传统多元化而言，它更具竞争优势。     

Impact of Divergent Consumer Confidence on Option Prices

This paper investigates the impact of divergent consumer confidence on option prices. To model this, we assume that consumers disagree on the expected growth rate of aggregate consumption. With other conditions unchanged in the discrete-time Black–Scholes option-pricing model, we show that the representative consumer will have declining relative risk aversion instead of the assumed constant relative risk aversion. In this case all options will be underpriced by the Black–Scholes model under the assumption of bivariate lognormality. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

异质性环境规制、技术创新与中国工业绿色化

基于中介效应模型和2007~2016年中国省际面板数据，构建异质性环境规制、技术创新与工业绿色化的作用机理理论分析框架，并通过构建异质性环境规制指标体系和工业绿色化指标体系将异质性环境规制与技术创新驱动工业绿色化的作用机理进行实证检验。研究发现：行政型环境规制对工业绿色化起抑制作用，不存在技术创新中介效应；市场型环境规制对工业绿色化的影响存在部分中介效应，可通过技术创新"挤出效应"抑制工业绿色化；公众型环境规制与工业绿色化关系只有中介效应，且公众型环境规制通过技术创新"激励效应"促进工业绿色化；异质性环境规制驱动工业绿色化的技术创新中介效应的研究结论经稳健性检验依然不变。研究认为：在推进异质性环境规制驱动工业绿色化过程中，应充分利用公众型环境规制驱动技术创新"激励效应"，同时应有效规避市场型环境规制驱动技术创新"挤出效应"。