Fragmented property rights and royalty bargaining

We consider production by a firm that relies on the patent rights that are held by other actors. Before production can take place, bargains have to be struck with each patent holder over the royalty per unit produced. In the negotiations, a patent holder must be mindful of the fact that a large royalty will increase the product price and lower demand for the final product. Hence each patent holder would prefer to gain a large royalty at the expense of rivals. When the producer makes the first offer in an alternating offer framework, we analyze whether it should conduct negotiations sequentially with some grouping of patent holders or simultaneously. We demonstrate that the producer will prefer simultaneous negotiation. An individual patent holder would prefer to negotiate early with the producer, and then to see remaining rights holders negotiate simultaneously. A firm that holds several patents would want to negotiate royalties on each one sequentially and then have simultaneous negotiation of payments to other rights holders.     

Externalities,communication and the allocation of decision rights

The assignment of authority entitles the decision maker to undertake decisions that impose externalities on the payoffs of other members of the organization. This paper studies how the optimal allocation of decision rights depends on the preferences of the organization’s members. It adopts a mechanism-design approach to show how the communication of private information affects the efficient allocation of authority. An extension to multiple decision areas shows that decentralized control rights may enhance organizational efficiency unless there exist strong complementarities between different decisions.     

Communication and coordination in the laboratory collective resistance game

This paper presents a laboratory collective resistance (CR) game to study how different forms of non-binding communication among responders can help coordinate their collective resistance against a leader who transgresses against them. Contrary to the predictions of analysis based on purely self-regarding preferences, we find that non-binding communication about intended resistance increases the incidence of no transgression even in the one-shot laboratory CR game. In particular, we find that the incidence of no transgression increases from 7 percent with no communication up to 25–37 percent depending on whether communication occurs before or after the leader’s transgression decision. Responders’ messages are different when the leaders can observe them, and the leaders use the observed messages to target specific responders for transgression.

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Harmful signaling in matching markets

Several labor markets, including the job market for new Ph.D. economists, have recently developed formal signaling mechanisms. We show that such mechanisms are harmful for some environments. While signals transmit previously unavailable information, they also facilitate information asymmetry that leads to coordination failures. In particular, we consider a two-sided matching game of incomplete information between firms and workers. Each worker has either the same “typical” known preferences with probability close to one or “atypical” idiosyncratic preferences with the complementary probability close to zero. Firms have known preferences over workers. We show that under some technical condition if at least three firms are responsive to some workerʼs signal, the introduction of signaling strictly decreases the expected number of matches.     

Communication in financial markets with several informed traders

This paper investigates the incentives for informed traders in financial markets to reveal their information truthfully to the public. In the model, a subset of traders receive noisy signals about the value of a risky asset. The signals are composed of a directional component (“high” vs. “low”) as well as a precision component that represents the quality of the directional component. Between trading periods, the informed agents make public announcements to the uninformed traders. With a sufficiently large number of informed traders, an equilibrium exists in which the directional components are credibly revealed, but not the precision components. Even though the informed traders retain some of their rivate information, the post-communication estimate of the asset value converges in probability to the full-information estimate as the number of informed traders increases. The paper is based on a chapter of my Ph.D. thesis at the University of Western Ontario and was circulated previously under the title “Public Communication Devices in Financial Markets.” I thank my dissertation committee Arthur Robson, Hari Govindan, and Al Slivinski for their guidance and support. I also thank Murali Agastya, Roland Benabou, Philippe Grégoire, Rick Harbaugh, Mike Peters, an anonymous referee and an associate editor, and seminar participants at various universities and conferences at which this paper was presented.     

试论水权转让过程中农民用水权益的保护

我国水资源严重短缺的基本国情使农村的供水与用水的矛盾越来越突出,加上城市和工业对水的需求日益扩大,农业水权的转让逐渐成为一种趋势。在农业水权转让的过程中,农民用水权益的保护成为了亟须重视的问题。目前我国农业水权转让制度不健全,使农业水权在向其他领域转让过程中出现了损害农民用水权益的现象。因而,分析农业水权在转让过程中对农民用水权益的影响因素,从而提出保护对策,为完善农民用水权益保障机制提供基础。     

Harmful lie aversion and lie discovery in noisy expert advice games

This study tests whether individuals are reluctant to tell lies, or perhaps only “harmful lies”, in a previously untested environment: an expert sending a message to a decision maker whose interpretation of that message is subject to error, i.e. a noisy sender–receiver game. In the Aligned treatment, the expert can send a “white lie” to the receiver, eliminating the negative effects of noise and improving both parties’ payoffs. In the Conflict treatment, lies are harmful and the inability to commit to truthtelling destroys all meaningful communication in equilibrium unless there is a cost of lying. In the experiment, receivers are overly trusting and experts learn to take advantage of this. As experts gain experience they tell stronger and more frequent lies in both treatments, consistent with models of reinforcement learning. The findings suggest that neither harmful nor universal lie aversion is a factor when communication is noisy, provided individuals have time to discover their personal benefits of lies.     

Whatever you say, your reputation precedes you: Observation and cheap talk in the trust game

Behavior in trust games has been linked to general notions of trust and trustworthiness, important components of social capital. In the equilibrium of a trust game, the investor does not invest, foreseeing that the allocator would keep all of the returns. We use a human-subjects experiment to test the effects of changes to the game designed to increase cooperation and efficiency. We add a pre-play stage in which the investor receives a cheap-talk message from the allocator, observes the allocator's previous decision, or both. None of these changes alter the game's theoretical predictions. We find that allowing observation results in substantially higher cooperation and efficiency, but cheap talk has little effect.     

Intellectual property rights, technology transfer and exports in developing countries

We develop a model to analyze one mechanism under which stronger intellectual property rights (IPR) protection may improve the ability of firms in developing countries to break into export markets. A Northern firm with a superior process technology chooses either exports or technology transfer through licensing as its mode of supplying the Southern market, based on local IPR policy. Given this decision, the North and South firms engage in Cournot competition in both markets. We find that stronger IPR would enhance technology transfer through licensing and reduce the South firm's marginal production cost, thereby increasing its exports. Welfare in the South would rise (fall) if that country has high (low) absorptive capacity. Excessively strong IPR diminish competition and welfare, however. Adding foreign direct investment as an additional channel of technology transfer sustains these basic messages.     

植物品种权转让行为研究

本文通过调查,从转让视角研究植物品种权转让运行机制,具体包括品种权转让的现状特点、主体行为、转让模式、转让策略等,以促进植物品种权有效运转,实现品种权最佳商业价值。     

Endogenous growth and property rights over renewable resources

We study how different regimes of access rights to renewable natural resources – namely open access versus full property rights – affect sustainability, growth and welfare in the context of modern endogenous growth theory. Resource exhaustion may occur under both regimes but is more likely to arise under open access. Moreover, under full property rights, positive resource rents increase expenditures on manufacturing goods and temporarily accelerate productivity growth, but also yield a higher resource price at least in the short-to-medium run. We characterize analytically and quantitatively the model׳s dynamics to assess the welfare implications of differences in property rights enforcement.     

Equilibrium selection in experimental cheap talk games

In the past, many refinements have been proposed to select equilibria in cheap talk games. Usually, these refinements were motivated by a discussion of how rational agents would reason in some particular cheap talk games. In this paper, we propose a new refinement and stability measure that is intended to predict actual behavior in a wide range of cheap talk games. According to our Average Credible Deviation Criterion (ACDC), the stability of an equilibrium is determined by the frequency and size of credible deviations. ACDC organizes the results from several cheap talk experiments in which behavior converges to equilibrium, even in cases where other criteria do not make a prediction.     

The effect of decision weights in bargaining problems

Bargaining problems are considered where the preferences of the bargainers deviate from expected utility but can be modelled according to rank-dependent utility theory. Under rank-dependent utility both the utility function and the probability weighting function influence the risk attitude of a decision maker. The same definition of risk aversion leads to two forms of risk aversion: utility risk aversion and probabilistic risk aversion. The main finding is that these two forms can have surprisingly opposite consequences for bargaining solutions that exhibit a weak monotonicity property. In particular, in a large class of bargaining problems both increased utility risk aversion and decreased probabilistic risk aversion of the opponent are advantagous for a player. This is demonstrated for the Kalai-Smorodinsky bargaining solution. The Nash bargaining solution does not behave regularly in this respect.     

Property and contract rights in autocracies and democracies

We present and test empirically a new theory of property and contract rights. Any incentive an autocrat has to respect such rights comes from his interest in future tax collections and national income and increases with his planning horizon. We find a compelling empirical relationship between property and contract rights and an autocrat's time in power. In lasting—but not in new—democracies, the same rule of law and individual rights that ensure continued free elections entail extensive property and contract rights. We show that the age of a democratic system is strongly correlated with property and contract rights.     

Opacity in bargaining over public good provision

We consider ultimatum bargaining over the provision of a public good. Offer-maker and responder can delegate their decisions to agents whose actual decision rules are opaque. We show that the responder will benefit from strategic opacity, even with bilateral delegation. The incomplete information created by strategic opacity choices does not lead to inefficient negotiation failure in equilibrium. Inefficiencies arise from an inefficient provision level. While an agreement will always be reached, the public good provision will fall short of the socially desirable level. Compared with unilateral delegation, bilateral delegation is never worse from a welfare perspective.     

Disagreement over the emergence of private property rights: alternative meanings, alternative explanations

This paper is an exercise in the history of thought, which compares Austrian and neoclassical theories of the emergence of private property rights, and examines, in part, the extent to which Austrians can be said to offer a commonly-agreed upon explanation that parallels Carl Menger's exemplary story of the emergence of money. We address the sources of disagreement (and apparent conflict) among emergence theorists in both schools. We try to show that some of the disagreement hinges on an unclear meaning of the term “emergence,” which is resolvable, while other sources of disagreement are fundamental at the methodological level. JEL Code B25, E40, E53     

The role of strategic uncertainty in games: An experimental study of cheap talk and contracts in the Nash demand game

We utilise results from a human-subjects experiment to examine the connection between strategic uncertainty and outcomes in games. Our basic game is a Nash demand game where one player has an outside option available. A “chat” treatment allows bargainers to send cheap-talk messages prior to playing the basic game, and in a “contracts” treatment, they can additionally propose and accept binding contracts. We propose that strategic uncertainty comprises at least two facets: “coordination-type”, which is lower in the chat game than in the basic game, and “rationality-type”, which is lower in the contracts game than in the chat game. We find that both types of strategic uncertainty impact bargaining outcomes: moving from the basic game to the chat game, and thence to contracts, improves several aspects of outcomes, such as higher efficiency, less opting out and less under-demanding. Other results include a treatment effect on the types of agreements that are reached.     

Learning to communicate in cheap-talk games

We study learning in communication games. Our main finding is that a simple forward-looking learning rule leads to communication in a large class of games. This class is characterized by a partial-common-interest condition. In contrast, we show that a variety of purely backward looking dynamics may fail to guarantee communication. Memory is a partial substitute for looking forward: With long memory, backward-looking learning leads to communication in a class of games with perfect incentive alignment.     

Truthtelling in Matching Markets

We analyze a search and matching model with non‐transferable utility and asymmetric information. Randomly paired agents go through an evaluation phase, at the end of which they discover each other's types and choose to match or not. Before deciding to enter this phase, agents can communicate through cheap talk. We provide conditions for this communication to be informative, and we examine how it affects agents' welfare. We show that communication is Pareto‐improving only when the matching is assortative in the absence of communication and left unchanged by information transmission.     

Exploring group decision making in a power-to-take experiment

Most studies that compare individual and group behavior neglect the in-group decision making process. This paper explores the decision making process within groups in a strategic setting: a two player power-to-take experiment. Discussions preceding group decisions are video taped and analyzed. We find the following: (1) no impact of the group setting as such on individual behavior; (2) heterogeneity of individual types; (3) perceptions of fairness are hardly discussed and are prone to the self-serving bias; (4) groups ignore the decision rule of other groups and typically view them as if they were single agents. (5) We also show that to explain group outcomes two factors have to be taken into account that are often neglected: the distribution of individual types over groups and the decision rules that groups use to arrive at their decision. JEL Classification A12 · C72 · C91 · C92