Ill-behaviour of transformation-frontiers with environmental quality versus pollution

If one looks at environmental quality N as a renewable natural resource (with its own natural dynamics) which is changed by emissions Z, then one gets a better understanding of the shape of the damage function. In the case of a logistic growth dynamics one obtains a well-shaped transformation frontier N(Z), even in a two-species natural dynamics. For a more general natural interaction in the framework of a prey-predator model one obtains the possibilities of a cusp catastrophe which makes the transformation frontier N(Z) ill-shaped for the standard arguments of economists and their most favoured environmental policy instruments.     

The most ordinally egalitarian of random voting rules

Aziz and Stursberg propose an “Egalitarian Simultaneous Reservation” rule (ESR), a generalization of Serial rule, one of the most discussed mechanisms in the random assignment problem, to the more general random social choice domain. This article provides an alternative definition, or characterization, of ESR as the unique most ordinally egalitarian one. Specifically, given a lottery p over alternatives, for each agent i the author considers the total probability share in p of objects from her first k indifference classes. ESR is shown to be the unique one which leximin maximizes the vector of all such shares (calculated for all i, k). Serial rule is known to be characterized by the same property. Thus, the author provides an alternative way to show that ESR, indeed, coincides with Serial rule on the assignment domain. Moreover, since both rules are defined as the unique most ordinally egalitarian ones, the result shows that ESR is “the right way” to think about generalizing Serial rule.     

Private Information in the BBV Model of Public Goods

To analyze the private provision of a public good in the presence of private information, we explore the connections between two frameworks: the binary public good model with threshold uncertainty and the standard continuous model à la Bergstrom et al. Linearity of best responses in others' contributions is key to matching the two frameworks. We identify all utility functions that display this linearity, and we provide conditions ensuring that the minimal properties that Bergstrom et al. require for utilities are satisfied. Using techniques developed in the threshold uncertainty framework, we show existence and uniqueness of the Bayes‐Nash equilibrium—thus generalizing existing results—and we analyze its comparative statics properties. In particular, under the reasonable assumption that agents' income is stochastic and private information, we complement the full‐information crowding‐out and redistribution results of Bergstrom et al. If the government taxes agents' income proportionally and redistributes (expected) revenues lump sum, equilibrium public good provision can increase or decrease, even if the set of contributors is unchanged. Similarly, we show that crowding‐out can be one‐for‐one, less than one‐for‐one, or more than one‐for‐one. Finally, we extend our results to a multidimensional framework in which agents' unit costs of contributions are also private information.     

Trust in triads: effects of exit, control, and learning

This paper provides theoretical background for some effects of social networks on trust. We study the implications of a model with rational actors in two settings with three actors. In the first setting, there are two trustees who are involved in transactions with one truster implying that the truster has an exit option. In the second setting, two trusters play with one trustee, which gives the trusters options for voice, i.e., complaining and informing each other about the trustee's behavior. We compare these models with a baseline model in which there is only one truster and one trustee. It turns out that the opportunities for placing and honoring trust do not change for the exit model compared to the baseline model. The opportunities for trust in the voice model differ from the baseline model only if both trusters inform each other at a rate that is high enough. Only if the possibilities for receiving information and transmitting information are large enough for both trusters, trust will increase due to the information exchange possibilities in the voice model.     

Supply and demand explanations and their ceteris paribusclauses

This paper argues that supply and demand explantions are causal explanations and that it is helpful to recognize this fact explicity, for then one can appreciate that the variables impounded in the ceteris paribusclauses attached to supply and demand curves are other causes. One can then specify clearly the conditions of membership in a ceteris pairbusclause: 1) include all those factors that within the given time period significantly affect the amount supplied or demanded but; 2) do not include any factors that themselves within the given time period significantly depend on the price of the particular commodity or service. Note the vague word ‘significantly’. If one insists on the general interdependencies established in general equilibrium analyses, one must reject partial equilibrium analyses altogether, but to do so would rule out work that may be enlightening and useful. Such theoretical purism is also indefensible, since general equilibrium analyse rely on similar causal approximations. This analyses of ceteris paribusclauses is helpful in understanding where supply and demand analysis or comparative statics goes wrong, as in traditional functional distribution theory.     

Uhljeb – a post-socialist homo croaticus: a personification of the economy of favours in Croatia?

Party patronage combined with a collectivist culture appears to present a very resistant socialist legacy in Croatia. In-group favouritism and an overly bureaucratised system provide a fertile soil for uhljebs. An uhljeb is a public sector employee whose main ‘competence’ is membership of a political party or a nepotistic relationship. They now already count in the thousands, and often contribute to the further multiplication of uhljebs, and to an increase in clientelist arrangements. The practice of employing uhljebs both undermines and underpins the existing system. That ambivalence is one of the characteristics of the Russian sistema, and that is one of the important links to compare blat users and uhljebs, in addition to the practice of ‘pulling strings’. As key protagonists, uhljebs and blat users illustrate their own and society’s modus operandi: an intense ‘economy of favours’. Recent studies increasingly show that cultural variables influence economic outcomes and this article presents an extension of the ‘economy of favours’ into Croatia’s paradigm. Based on primary sources and international benchmarks, it provides a comparison of the cultural contexts of Eastern and Western European countries, and portrays a rising informal practice that, despite its omnipresence, has been under-researched in the academic literature.     

The value of information in oligopoly with demand uncertainty

This paper discusses the value of information in supermodular and submodular games, using a simple duopoly model where the level of demand is uncertain. It is shown that the value of information issuperadditive (resp.,subadditive) between players if the game issupermodular (resp.,submodular). For example, in a Bertrand (resp., Cournot) market with (possibly imperfect) substitute products, one firm's information acquisition increases (resp., decreases) the other firm's incentive to acquire the same information. Furthermore, when the game is either supermodular or submodular, the value of information is higher when the player isexpected to be informed according to the opponent's belief than when the player is expected to be uninformed; this result is reversed when the game has asymmetric modularity (i.e., one player's action is substitutional to the other's, and the latter's action is complemental to the former's). These qualitative observations have a potential to be applied to a larger class of games with uncertainty where payoffs are smooth (e.g., twice continuously differentiable) in actions and states.     

On the Relationship between Risk-Dominance and Stochastic Stability

In a 2 × 2 symmetric game with two symmetric equilibria, one risk-dominates another if and only if the equilibrium strategy is a unique best response to any mixture that gives itself at least a probability of one-half. In a two-person strategic form game, we call a Nash equilibriumglobally risk-dominantif it consists of strategies such that each one of them is a unique best response to any mixture that gives the other at least a probability of one-half. We show that if a weakly acyclic two-person game has a globally risk-dominant equilibrium, then this is the one that is selected by the stochastic equilibrium selection process of Young.Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Numbers: C72, C73.     

The origins of meso economics

The paper starts from Schumpeter’s proposition that entrepreneurs carry out innovations (the micro level), that swarms of followers imitate them (meso) and that, as a consequence, ‘creative destruction’ leads to economic development ‘from within’ (macro). It is argued that Schumpeter’s approach can be developed into a new—more general—micro-meso-macro framework in economics. Center stage is meso. Its essential characteristic is bimodality, meaning that one idea (the generic rule) can be physically actualized by many agents (a population). Ideas can relate to others, and, in this way, meso constitutes a structure component of a ‘deep’ invisible macro structure. Equally, the rule actualization process unfolds over time—modelled in the paper as a meso trajectory with three phases of rule origination, selective adoption and retention—and here meso represents a process component of a visible ‘surface’ structure. The macro measure with a view to the appropriateness of meso components is generic correspondence. At the level of ideas, its measure is order; at that of actual relative adoption frequencies, it is generic equilibrium. Economic development occurs at the deep level as transition from one generic rule to another, inducing a change of order, and, at the surface level, as the new rule is adopted, destroying an old equilibrium and establishing a new one.     

Quasitransitive social preference: why some very large coalitions have very little power

Summary. If only the strict part of social preference is required to be transitive then Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives implies that there is a coalition containing all but one individual that cannot force x to be socially ranked above y for at least half of the pairs of alternatives (x,y). Received: August 29, 1996; revised version: March 24, 1997     

Matching for teams

We are given a list of tasks Z and a population divided into several groups X _j of equal size. Performing one task z requires constituting a team with exactly one member x _j from every group. There is a cost (or reward) for participation: if type x _j chooses task z, he receives p _j (z); utilities are quasi-linear. One seeks an equilibrium price, that is, a price system that distributes all the agents into distinct teams. We prove existence of equilibria and fully characterize them as solutions to some convex optimization problems. The main mathematical tools are convex duality and mass transportation theory. Uniqueness and purity of equilibria are discussed. We will also give an alternative linear-programming formulation as in the recent work of Chiappori et al. (Econ Theory, to appear).     

The genuine savings criterion and the value of population

Summary. In any dynamic model of the economy with changing population, the latter should properly be one of the state variables of the system. It enters both in the maximand, at least under total utilitarianism, and into the production function in one way or another. If population growth is exponential and constant returns prevails, then a simple transformation to per capita variables can be used to eliminate one state variable, but this ceases to be true if growth is not exponential, as it obviously is not and cannot be. If the growth of population is exogenous, then introducing it into the system does not affect the optimal policy. However, if one asks whether the system is sustainable, in the sense of at least maintaining total welfare (integral of discounted utilities), then the criterion is that that the value of the rates of change of the state variables is non-negative, so that the shadow price of population becomes relevant. In this paper, we derive explicit formulas in a simple model, showing that the rate of growth of per capita capital is not the correct formula but must have another terms added to it. We also study the question under an alternative criterion of long-run average utilitarianism. Received: June 1, 2002; revised version: September 27, 2002 RID="*" ID="*"Research support was provided by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. An earlier version of this paper was presented at a celebration of Mordecai Kurz's 66th birthday at Stanford University, 1–3 August 2002. Correspondence to: K.J. Arrow     

On the Relative Equitability of a Family of Taxation Rules

A taxation problem consists of collecting a given amount of taxes out of a population whose gross income vector is given. A tax rule R is more equitable than a rule R′ when the after‐tax income vector generated by R Lorenz dominates that generated by R′. In this paper, we present a one‐parameter family of tax rules whose members are fully ranked in terms of relative equitability, for any (finite) income distribution.     

Fictitious play in ‘one-against-all’ multi-player games

Summary. A compound game is an (n + 1) player game based on n two-person subgames. In each of these subgames player 0 plays against one of the other players. Player 0 is regulated, so that he must choose the same strategy in all n subgames. We show that every fictitious play process approaches the set of equilibria in compound games for which all subgames are either zero-sum games, potential games, or games. Received: July 18, 1997; revised version: December 4, 1998     

The Status Quo in Contractarian-Constitutionalist Perspective

That it favors the status quo is one of the most common and persistent objections raised against the contractarian-constitutionalist approach and, specifically, against its emphasis on voluntary agreement as the fundamental legitimizing principle for social reform. This paper seeks to clarify certain ambiguities that have surrounded the arguments of critics as well as contractarian responses to them. Its main emphasis will be on separating two issues the differences between which have not always been sufficiently recognized in the debate, namely, on the one hand, the role of the status quo as the inevitable starting point of any change and, on the other hand, the issue of the normative evaluation of the status quo.     

Optimal compliance with emission constraints: dynamic characteristics and the choice of technique

The paper analyzes how to comply with an emission constraint, which restricts the use of an established energy technique, given the two options to save energy and to invest in two alternative energy techniques. These techniques differ in their deterioration rates and the investment lags of the corresponding capital stocks. Thus, the paper takes a medium-term perspective on climate change mitigation, where the time horizon is too short for technological change to occur, but long enough for capital stocks to accumulate and deteriorate. It is shown that, in general, only one of the two alternative techniques prevails in the stationary state, although, both techniques might be utilized during the transition phase. Hence, while in a static economy only one technique is efficient, this is not necessarily true in a dynamic economy.      

Looking Backward at Feasible Socialism: Using Bellamy to Teach Schumpeter

This article demonstrates the parallels between Bellamy's fictional society in Looking Backward and Schumpeter's socialist blueprint Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. The socialist system Joseph Schumpeter describes is nearly identical to that in Edward Bellamy's utopia. Because Bellamy's society is a concrete one set within the readable confines of a novel, it provides a useful benchmark for students analyzing Schumpeter.     

The hidden economy in Spain – A monetary estimation, 1964–1998

The aim of this paper is to estimate the level and evolution of hidden income in Spain during the period 1964–1997. To this end, we employ the well-known monetary approach which supposes that the hidden economy is a response on the part of the economic agents to the tax burden, one which manifests itself in an excess of demand for currency. The estimation has been made on the basis of the ADL technique, an ECM and Johansen's cointegration approach. The period chosen was characterised by multiple institutional changes, an increase in the tax burden and wide-ranging financial liberalisation. This has obliged us to formulate a specific monetary model to estimate the hidden economy and is one of the original features of that model. First version received: February 1999/Final version received: March 2001     

THE ECONOMICS OF THE NON-DISTRIBUTION CONSTRAINT: A CRITICAL REAPPRAISAL

ABSTRACT ** ** Résumé en fin d'article; Zusammenfassung am Ende des Artikels; resumen al fin del artículo.
: This paper re‐examines the non‐distribution constraint as a key structural feature of non‐profit organization. It argues that its traditional understanding as a trustworthiness‐enhancing device is incomplete. This paper shows that the non‐distribution constraint is also a reflection of the directly utility‐enhancing character of involvement in non‐profit firms for their key stakeholders. This alternative explanation allows one to solve the central puzzle of trustworthiness theory: why doesn't the non‐distribution constraint destroy entrepreneurial motivation? Additionally, it helps one to understand the role of the non‐distribution constraint in economic theories of non‐profit organization that do not rely on trustworthiness theory. Finally, it enables one to logically integrate the different economic theories of non‐profit organization.     

A Note on the Probability of k Pure Nash Equilibria in Matrix Games

A formula is derived for the probability that a "randomly selected" n-person matrix game has exactly k pure strategy equilibria. It is shown that for all n ≥ 2, this probability converges to e⁻¹/k! as the sizes of the strategy sets of at least two players increase without bound. Thus the number of pure strategy equilibria in large random n-person matrix games is approximately Poisson distributed with mean one. The latter is a known result obtained by a new proof in this note. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Number: C72.