On the equilibrium properties of locational sorting models

Important to many models of location choice is the role of local interactions or spillovers, whereby the payoffs from choosing a location depend in part on the number or attributes of other individuals or firms that choose the same or nearby locations in equilibrium. This paper develops the equilibrium properties of a broadly applicable and readily estimable class of sorting models that allow location decisions to depend on both fixed local attributes (including unobserved attributes) and local interactions, describes the conditions under which equilibria exist and are unique, and provides a test for uniqueness in empirical analyses of sorting equilibrium.     

和谐社会中公共组织系统控制机制研究

和谐社会的本质在于各利益群体之间的均衡博弈,而创建和谐社会的关键在于各种类型的组织之间及其内部利益关系的和谐。公共组织系统自组织发展的顺利进行是构建和谐社会的重要内容。本文分析了在公共组织系统自组织发展过程中存在的因利益而产生的矛盾和冲突,在此基础上提出构建公共组织系统和谐发展的控制机制的若干建议。     

Public education under capital mobility

The paper considers a two-country model of overlapping generations economies with intergenerational transfers motivated by altruism and investment in human capital. We examine in a non-stationary competitive equilibrium the optimal provision of education with and without capital market integration. First, we explore how regimes of education provision—public, private or mixed—arise and how they affect the dynamics of autarkic economies. Second, we study the effects of capital market integration, in equilibrium, on the optimal provision of education. Third, we show that capital market integration enhances government intervention in the provision of public education (to improve the welfare of its constituents) and consider various solutions to such a competition.     

Monopolistic Competition and Public Good Provision with By‐Product Firms

I develop a model in which the voluntary contributions mechanism for the provision of public goods totally breaks down in a large society. A by‐product firm sells a private good and uses its profits to provide a public good. By‐product firms compete with for‐profit firms in a monopolistically competitive industry. If the number of by‐product firms is proportional to the size of the society, then public good provision rises without bound as the society grows large. This stands in strong contrast to the results under the voluntary contributions mechanism.     

The median voter and the median consumer: Local private goods and population composition

When a product's product provision entails fixed costs, it will be made available only if a sufficient number of people want it. Some products are produced and consumed locally, so that provision requires not only a large group favoring the product but a large number nearby. Just as local governments provide public goods appealing to individuals sharing the median voter's preferences for local public goods, product markets may provide an analogous benefit to individuals sharing living communities whose consumers tend to share his preferences in private goods. Using zip code level data on chain restaurants and restaurants overall, this paper documents how the mix of locally available restaurants responds to the local mix of consumers, with three findings. First, based on survey data on chain restaurant patronage, restaurant preferences differ substantially by race and education. Second, there is a strong relationship between restaurants and population at the zip code level, suggesting that restaurants' geographic markets are small. Finally, the mix of locally available chain restaurants is sensitive to the zip code demographic mix by race and by education. Hence, differentiated product markets provide a benefit—proximity to preferred restaurants—to persons in geographic markets whose customers tend to share their preferences.     

Rational Nonprofit Entrepreneurship

This paper derives the decision to found a nonprofit firm as the equilibrium outcome of a multistage game among individuals who would like a public good to be provided. The model predicts that if individuals will voluntarily contribute towards provision of the public good, then it is in the self-interest of the entrepreneur to impose a nondistribution constraint on herself by founding a nonprofit firm.     

Taxation in an economy with private provision of public goods

This paper analyses the effects of taxation and subsidies in an economy with private provision of a public good. It is shown that in a situation where all individuals contribute, taxation affects the equilibrium allocation if and only if at least one individual's voluntary contribution to the public good has an impact on the aggregate tax payments of the others. We then consider linear nonneutral tax-subsidy schemes and analyse efficiency and uniqueness of the resulting Nash equilibria. We show that an efficient Nash equilibrium, where all individuals contribute, will in general not be unique, and establish a non-uniformity property which a tax-subsidy scheme must fulfil in order to induce a unique interior equilibrium that is efficient. Throughout the paper it is assumed that individuals fully understand and take into account the government's budget constraint. Received: 3 November 1997 / Accepted: 23 March 1999     

Bayesian incentive compatible beliefs

The problem of incentives for correct revelation is studied as a game with incomplete information where players have individual beliefs concerning other's types. General conditions on the beliefs are given which are shown to be sufficient for the existence of a Pareto-efficient mechanism for which truth-telling is a Bayesian equilibrium.     

The system of towns with spatial public goods

In this paper, we introduce a model of ‘spatial public goods’, whose provision costs depend on the size of the benefit area. It is assumed that there are many developers providing spatial public goods in their towns. Each developer chooses the area size of his/her town and the quality of its spatial public good so as to maximize profit, taking the market price system as given. Each consumer chooses the level of the public good, and hence the town that supplies it, so as to maximize his/her utility. We show that the competitive equilibrium allocation of this economy is efficient.     

(Non-)Existence of Equilibria in Multicommunity Models

This paper reconsiders equilibrium existence in models with migration and voting over local public goods. We show that under some straightforward assumptions on preferences and income distributions, the basic structure of multicommunity models (i.e., perfect mobility, majority rule, single crossing property) implies that no equilibrium with jurisdictions conducting different policies can exist. Stratification equilibria—with sorting of the population according to income classes—are therefore not as natural as is sometimes suggested. Mechanisms that can serve to support stratification (i.e., tight housing markets, returns to scale in the provision of publicly consumed goods) are discussed.     

Looking across borders: A test of spatial policy interdependence using local government efficiency ratings

Spatial patterns in (local) government taxation and spending decisions have received a lot of attention. Still, the focus on taxation or expenditure levels in previous studies may be incomplete. Indeed, (rational) individuals are likely to consider the level of spending on (or taxation for) public goods provision simultaneously with how much public goods they actually receive—thus assessing the ‘price/quantity’ of government policies. Therefore, the present paper argues that incumbents may want their ‘price/quantity’ ratio to be close to that in neighbouring regions. Analysing Flemish local governments' efficiency ratings for the year 2000 (which relate total spending to the quantity of locally provided public goods), we confirm the existence of neighbourhood effects in local government policies.     

Mixed oligopoly, foreign firms, and location choice

We investigate a mixed market in which a state-owned, welfare-maximizing public firm competes against n domestic private firms and m foreign private firms which are all profit-maximizing. A circular city model with quantity-setting competition is employed. We find that the equilibrium location pattern depends on m. All private firms agglomerate in the unique equilibrium if m is zero or one. Two foreign firms induce differentiation between domestic and foreign private firms. More than two foreign firms yield differentiation among the foreign firms. Regardless of n and m, agglomeration of all domestic private firms appears in equilibrium. We provide several conditions in which eliminating the public firm from the market enhances social welfare. We extend the basic model and investigate three issues concerning multiple public firms, inefficiency of the public firm, and entries by private firms. We obtain some additional implications of welfare and equilibrium locations.     

Strong measures of group coherence and the probability that a pairwise majority rule winner exists

A Pairwise Majority Rule Winner (PMRW) exists for a voting situation if some candidate can defeat each of the remaining candidates by Pairwise Majority Rule. The PMRW would be very appropriate for selection as the winner of an election, but it is well known that such a candidate does not always exist. This paper concludes a series of studies regarding the probability that a PMRW should be expected to exist in three-candidate elections, by introducing the notion of a strong measures of mutually coherent group preferences. In order for voting situations to be reasonably expected to fail to have a PMRW in a three-candidate election, voters’ preferences must be generated in an environment that is far removed from the situation in which there is a strong-overall-unifying candidate. So far removed, that it is extremely unlikely that a PMRW will not exist in voting situations with large electorates for a small number of candidates.     

基于PPP项目的风险分担机制研究综述

公私合作模式(PPP)是应用于公共基础设施建设的一种融资模式,由于参与者多,风险分担是PPP项目取得成功的关键.目前对PPP项目风险分担机制的研究主要有两种:一是政府与私人投资者双方之间的风险分担机制.二是项目各参与方之间的风险分担机制.重点论述和评价了国内外关于PPP项目风险分担的涵义、风险分担的原则、风险分担条件、风险分担谈判过程、风险分担矩阵和风险分担的相关模型,并对风险分担的研究作了进一步展望.     

The representation of the people with disabilities in the internet publishing: North Cyprus example

The representation of people with disabilities in the media is an issue that is not much emphasized. This article studies the representation of people with disabilities in the internet publications, especially in Northern Cyprus. This research, tries to emphasize the way media discuss the issue of disabled people alongside to show how disabled people be presented to the public as a meta in the consumption society and to discuss the discrimination against disabled people. The research focuses on the presentation of the disability as unprotected individuals and the work carried out by the society to sympathize with the individual and in particular on the decoding of the child with disabilities while doing these activities. Media organizations have a widespread belief in their news that they are discriminatory in that they impose disabilities as ‘needy’ individuals. This study discusses how and where barriers are the layout win if on the internet.

     

Aggregation of heterogeneous beliefs

This paper is a generalization of [Calvet, L., Grandmont, J.-M., Lemaire, I., 2002. Aggregation of heterogenous beliefs and asset pricing in complete financial markets. Working paper] to a dynamic setting. We propose a method to aggregate heterogeneous individual probability beliefs, in dynamic and complete asset markets, into a single consensus probability belief. This consensus probability belief, if commonly shared by all investors, generates the same equilibrium prices as well as the same individual marginal valuation as in the original heterogeneous probability beliefs setting. As in [Calvet, L., Grandmont, J.-M., Lemaire, I., 2002. Aggregation of heterogenous beliefs and asset pricing in complete financial markets. Working paper], the construction stands on a fictitious adjustment of the market portfolio. The adjustment process reflects the aggregation bias due to the diversity of beliefs. In this setting, the construction of a representative agent is shown to be also valid.     

Hierarchies of beliefs and the belief-invariant Bayesian solution

The belief-invariant Bayesian solution is a notion of correlated equilibrium in games with incomplete information proposed by Forges (1993), and hierarchy of beliefs over conditional beliefs is introduced by Ely and Peski (2006) in their study of interim independent rationalizability. We study the connection between the two concepts. We partially characterize the correlations embedded among type spaces with the same set of hierarchies of beliefs over conditional beliefs with partially correlating devices, which send correlated signals to players in a way that preserves each player’s belief about others’ types. Since the belief-invariant Bayesian solution is also implemented by such correlating devices, we then establish that it is invariant on equivalent type space.     

Teaching an old dog a new trick: Reserve price and unverifiable quality in repeated procurement

This paper shows that, in a repeated competitive procurement, a buyer can use the reserve price in a low-price auction as a “public”—hence nondiscriminatory—incentive device to elicit unverifiable quality. We study a model with many firms and one buyer, who is imperfectly informed on the firms' costs. When firms are ex ante identical, the provision of quality is sustained by a sufficiently high reserve price to reward firms for the quality provision and by the threat of setting a low reserve price forever, if quality is not delivered. The buyer can elicit the desired level of unverifiable quality provided her baseline valuation of the project is not too high and the net benefit from unverifiable quality is not too low. These results are robust to firms' heterogeneity in their time preferences when the punishment for a deviation is finite but sufficiently long.     

Pareto improving interventions in a general equilibrium model with private provision of public goods

Most of the literature on government intervention in models of voluntary public goods supply focuses on interventions that increase the total level of a public good, which is considered to be typically underprovided. However, an intervention that is successful in increasing the public good level need not benefit everyone. In this paper we take a direct approach to welfare properties of voluntary provision equilibria in a full blown general equilibrium model with public goods and study interventions that have the goal of Pareto improving on the voluntary provision outcome. Towards this end, we study a model with many private goods and non-linear production technology for the public good, and hence allow for relative price effects to serve as a powerful channel of intervention. In this setup we show that Pareto improving interventions generally do exist. In particular, direct government provision financed by “small” , or “local” , lump-sum taxes can be used generically to Pareto improve upon the voluntary provision outcome.     

Non-cooperative Households and the Size and Composition of Public Expenditure

This paper presents a model in which the composition and size of public spending are determined through a political process. Agents differ in wage rates, and live in households positively sorted by wage; household production benefits both partners but the partners interact non-cooperatively, hence the laissez-faire equilibrium is inefficient. There are three policy tools, a labour income tax rate, a cash transfer and an in-kind transfer. The latter can be combined with household production to generate a household public good. All agents agree on some form of public intervention to remedy the inefficiency, but low-wagers prefer high taxes and cash transfers, while high-wagers prefer low taxes and in-kind provision. Under the empirically plausible assumption that voting participation is positively correlated with income, the equilibrium policy will be of the sort preferred by voters with above-mean income. This effect is accentuated by increased inequality.A previous version of this paper has been presented at the 2004 EPCS conference in Berlin; we thank our discussant Stanley Winer, as well as two referees of this journal, for insightful comments