The social efficiency of instruments of promotion of renewable energies: A transaction-cost perspective

This paper compares the social efficiency of the regulatory instruments used to promote renewable energy sources in electricity generation, taking into consideration their role in promoting the preservation of collective goods. They are based on a purchase obligation and act either by price (feed-in tariffs) or by quantity (bidding for new RES-E capacities; RES-E quotas). From the Public Economics perspective, the two instruments are distinct in terms of cost-efficacy and market incentives in a world of imperfect information. Exchangeable quotas of green certificates are preferred because this instrument allows better control over consumer costs and whilst retaining market incentives. Transaction cost economics (TCE) contributes to the assessment of these instruments, by introducing RES-E investment safeguard as a major determinant of social efficiency, and the instruments' conformity to its institutional environment as a determinant of its viability. In light of this additional consideration, the arrangements between RES-E producers and obligated buyers inherent in each instrument are in fact quite similar—either long-term contracting or vertical integration. We compare and assess RES-E price- and quantity-instruments on several dimensions from both the public economics and TCE perspectives: control of the cost for consumers, safeguards of RES-E investments, adaptability of the instrument in order to preserve its stability in the long run, market incentive intensity, and conformity with the new market regime of electricity industry. It shows neither instruments offer an optimal solution in each of these dimensions. The government will thus select an instrument in accordance with the relative importance of its objectives.     

马克思社会分工制度理论研析:一个视角和两个维度

基于分工和社会分工制度动态演进的视角,本文力图从纵、横两个维度揭示分工与技术进步、生产力发展、商品经济和迂回生产之间交互作用、循环累积的内在机制。在纵向上,探索不同社会形态下社会分工制度与商品经济和市场经济同步互动发展的历史演进规律;在横向上,从当代不同劳动分工形态共生并存和相互转化中考察社会分工制度的最新发展及其演进趋势,进而揭示和丰富马克思社会分工制度理论的科学内涵。在此基础上,回答与社会分工制度密切相关的几个问题,并引出相关结论。     

The dynamics of technological partners: a social network perspective

The selection and establishment of research partners is increasingly important in innovation and strategic research. Using a panel dataset of patents by 2846 researchers from a large US biotechnology company between 1976 and 2013, we examined the relationships between spanning structural holes and partner dynamics, which are captured by the entry of new partners and the persistence of existing partners. Then, we tested the possible moderating effect of dynamic exploratory ability. Based on the results of negative binomial regression models with fixed effects in the longitudinal design, we found that spanning structural holes was negatively associated with the entry of new partners and positively associated with the persistence of existing partners. Furthermore, exploratory ability positively moderated these relationships. Aside from having managerial implications for innovators, the findings of our interdisciplinary study are relevant for research on partner dynamics, strategy research, and exploration processes.     

Resource availability in the social cloud: An economics perspective

Social cloud has emerged as a case of sharing economy, where socially connected agents share their computing resources within the community. This paper considers the social cloud as an endogenous resource-sharing network, where agents are involved in closeness-based conditional resource sharing. This study focuses on (1) the impact of agents' decisions of link addition and deletion on their own local and global resource availability as well as on others' global resource availability (as spillover effects), (2) the role of agents' closeness in determining spillover effects, (3) agents' link addition behavior, and (4) stability and efficiency of the social cloud. The findings include the following: (i) Agents' decision of link addition (deletion) increases (decreases) their local resource availability. However, these observations do not hold in the case of global resource availability. (ii) In a connected network, agents experience either a positive or a negative spillover effect and there is no case with no spillover effects. Agents observe no spillover effects if and only if the network is disconnected with three or more components. Furthermore, an agent experiences negative spillover if there is no change in its closeness. Although an increase in the closeness of agents is necessary to experience positive spillover effects, the condition is not sufficient. (iii) We study the relation between agents' distance from each other, and their local as well as global resource availabilities. We prove that the local resource availability of an agent from another agent increases with decrease in the distance between them and that maximum local resource availability is obtained from the agent with the least closeness. Using these results, we discuss which agent to add a link to, so as to maximize the local resource availability. We discuss why such results are difficult to establish for global resource availability. However, in a two-diameter network, we show that for an agent, link formation always increases the global resource availability. (iv) We also study resource-sharing network formation and its efficiency in a strategic setting. We prove the existence of a pairwise stable network. Furthermore, we provide a set of conditions for a few prominent network structures (star, complete, wheel, and bipartite networks) to be pairwise stable. We show that the “connected in pairs, otherwise disconnected” network is better than a connected network, in terms of social welfare.     

The neglect of comparison income: An historical perspective

Abstract

Theories of social comparison have a long presence in the social sciences and have provided many useful insights. In economics, the idea of comparison, aspiration or relative income belongs to this theoretical framework. The first systematic usages of this notion can be found in the works of Keynes and Duesenberry. After these works the concept was relatively ignored by orthodox theorists until its recent re-appearance, mainly in the fields of labour and macroeconomics. To the contrary, however, income comparisons continued to play a role in much of Keynesian inspired and non-mainstream economics literature. In the past few years it has made a strong comeback in the literature of job satisfaction and of the economics of happiness. This paper attempts to trace the development of the concept in the modern history of economic thought. It also discusses the main theoretical implications of adopting income comparisons and possible reasons for its relative disregard by orthodox economics.     

增长失衡与政府责任:基于社会性支出角度的分析

There exists a kind of growth imbalance in China’s current development process, which is essentially characterized by the imbalance between the nation’s wealth and the people’s welfare. This paper points out that growth imbalance results mostly from insufficient government social spending on people’s welfare. Consequently, the government should shoulder the basic responsibility for the provision of education, health and social security, quicken the transformation of government expenditure structure and increase the share of social spending, in order to improve the people’s welfare and achieve the rebalancing of growth. The increase in social spending can also promote the accumulation of human capital, which will help the conversion of economic growth pattern and the realization of sustainable and healthy economic development. Translated from Jingji Yanjiu 经济研究 (Economic Research Journal), 2006, (10): 4–17     

The relationship between innovation network and innovation capability: a social network perspective

The key for acquiring innovation capability is knowledge transmission which is primarily based on the closer and tighter connections among businesses and other actors within innovation networks. Previous literature of patent analysis based on social network only explains the most influential corporations within an industry through social network indicators, but did not investigate the impact of these indicators on a firm’s innovation capability. This study uses social network perspective ‘centrality, cohesion and density’ to investigate the relationship between innovation network and innovation capability in the global semiconductor industry. Two purposes of this study are: (1) to investigate the innovation network relationship within the semiconductor industry at different periods and its evolution and (2) to study whether network position occupied by a firm in innovation network influences innovation capability. The empirical results show that firms with higher centrality and higher density have stronger innovation capability, but the weaker innovation capability with closer connection of sub-cluster (cohesion).     

Neutral agents and social tolerance: a dynamic perspective based on economic interaction model with local social cost functions

The influence of neutral agents on the evolutionary dynamics of social tolerance is discussed based on a recently proposed economic interaction model with local social cost functions. We show that the dynamical structure of social tolerance is completely changed even if a few neutral agents are introduced into the society. Especially, the full intolerance steady state, which is stable in previous works, becomes unstable and avoidable due to the economic incentive introduced by the neutral agents. The necessary condition of achieving full tolerance is also reduced compared to previous works without neutral agents.     

IPO抑价理论演化与文献综述

IPO抑价指新股上市首日收益率显著为正的现象。IPO抑价在世界范围内广泛存在,作为一种金融异象广受实务界的重视,同时作为一种热点课题在理论研究中经久不衰。国外研究认为,IPO抑价受资本市场有效性(如信息传递效率)、监管制度(如新股发行制度)、投资者行为(如羊群效应、异质预期)等多种因素的影响,由此大致形成市场派、制度派和行为派三个主要研究分支。基于我国资本市场"新兴+转轨"的现实背景,国内研究较多关注市场结构、制度变革等因素对IPO抑价的解释能力。文章首先对IPO抑价理论含义进行了深入辨析,然后对既有文献进行了综合梳理和分析,最后得出研究结果,其结果不仅有助于为进一步深入研究该问题提供统一的理论框架,而且有助于在揭示差异的基础上寻求更适合我国发行市场现状的理论模型和研究方法。     

Volatility equicorrelation: A cross-market perspective

This paper contains the first empirical application of the Dynamic Equicorrelation (DECO) model to a cross-market dataset composed of equities, bonds, foreign exchange rates and commodities during 1983–2013. The originality of our approach consists of examining the volatility equicorrelations, by updating the concept of ‘volatility surprise’. We document that the average volatility equicorrelation across markets is around 15%, while being time-varying with regime shifts before/after September 2005 and with a low mean-reversion level.     

Contingent valuation: A new perspective

After several decades of academic research on the contingent valuation (CV) method a consistent behavioral explanation of ‘hypothetical bias’ is still lacking. Based on evidence from economics, economic psychology and the political sciences, I propose an explanation that is based on two simple working hypotheses about respondent behavior in contingent valuation surveys. The first hypothesis is that survey respondents are unable to form consistent preferences about unfamiliar goods unless the choice context offers reliable, informative cues which can be rationally exploited in simplified heuristics. The second hypothesis is that the probability and impact of strategic responses in dichotomous-choice questions about public goods depends on the extent to which the presented hypothetical costs differ from the actual costs. The literature on hypothetical bias is revisited in the light of these behavioral hypotheses. I find that the hypotheses are generally supported by the empirical data. Moreover, the hypotheses are able to explain several important empirical phenomena that previous research has not been able to explain. In particular, they solve the puzzle that pre-election polls, but not CV surveys, are able to predict actual referendum outcomes, and they explain why income effects on willingness to pay are lower in CV responses than in actual votes. If confirmed by further studies, the hypotheses will have important implications for future research and practice. First, the hypothetical costs presented in the dichotomous-choice question should to be close enough to the actual costs to be credible to all respondents. This can be achieved by specifying the costs as a percentage (rather than absolute) change in taxes. Second, the respondents should be given the option to answer based on information about the positions of large parties and interest groups with known political orientation rather than based on the raw policy information. Theory and evidence suggest that this new survey paradigm largely eliminates the fundamental problems of the conventional stated preference methods.     

Technological change: A macro perspective

This article attempts to describe the macro features of technological advance. It suggests a taxonomy of technological artifacts, outlines the fundamental trends in technological evolution, and reviews some of the influences impinging on these trends. In doing this it offers a toolkit for anticipating the broad thrust of technological evolution.     

Burn or bury? A social cost comparison of final waste disposal methods

This paper evaluates the two well-known final waste disposal methods, incineration and landfilling. In particular we compare the social cost of two best-available technologies using a point estimate based on private and environmental cost data for the Netherlands. Not only does our comparison allow for Waste-to-Energy incineration plants but for landfills as well. The data provide support for the widespread policy preference for incineration over landfilling only if the analysis is restricted to environmental costs alone and includes savings of both energy and material recovery. Gross private costs, however, are so much higher for incineration, that landfilling is the social cost minimizing option at the margin even in a densely populated country such as the Netherlands. Furthermore, we show that our result generalizes to other European countries and probably to the USA. Implications for waste policy are discussed as well. Proper treatment of and energy recovery from landfills seem to be the most important targets for waste policy. Finally, WTE plants are a very expensive way to save on climate change emissions.     

Electronic word-of-mouth communities from the perspective of social network analysis

This paper is focused on the identification of influencers that can have an important impact over the decision-making of other users. For this purpose, a popular electronic word-of-mouth community like Ciao.com has been modelled as a social network. Using social network analysis techniques, the existence of influencers is justified by the power law distribution of user participation, and then they are identified using their topological features within the social network. The obtained results reveal that influencers are not determined by the number of performed reviews, but by the variety or scope of their performed reviews and their central position in the consumer network. The main contribution of this research is the identification of influencers based on the participation features of community users. As a difference to other studies, results are not based on surveys or opinions, but on the trace users leave when they post opinions, comments or scores.     

Provincial economic performance and underpricing of IPOs: Evidence from political interventions in China

We examine the underpricing of 2,131 Chinese initial public offerings (IPOs) between 2005 and 2017. The results indicate that state-owned enterprises (SOEs) controlled by the local government (local SOEs) offer significantly higher underpricing when they go public than SOEs controlled by the central government and non-SOEs do. This phenomenon is evident for local SOEs from less developed provinces, after controlling for the direct effect of regional economic performance. These results suggest local government officials underprice initial public offerings to make regional companies successfully go public to promote the regional economy.     

IPO盈余"过度包装"的治理机制设计

中国A股上市公司IPO"过度包装"现象普遍存在,一个根本原因是当IPO公司的价值被高估时,对IPO公司的高定价行为缺乏有效的治理机制.本文在中国特定的环境下,分析了初始公司面临发股收益、持股收益与控制权收益组合时,IPO公司价值被高估没有约束机制以及引入约束时对于公司股票发行定价决策的影响.本文通过设计一个发股收益与控制权收益不可兼得的治理机制,可以把IPO盈余"过度包装"的融资行为内生化.