Efficient Allocations in Club Economies

We explore the characteristics of Pareto‐optimal allocations in the context of local public goods or clubs. A set of first‐order conditions for Pareto optimality is provided. Classical treatments apparently neglect an important term related to migrant compensation, and thus are incorrect. A Pareto optimum is shown to exist.     

Market Games in Large Economies with a Finite Number of Types

We study market games derived from an exchange economy with a continuum of agents, each having one of finitely many possible types. The type of agent determines his initial endowment and utility function. It is shown that, unlike the well-known Shapley–Shubik theorem on market games (Shapley and Shubik in J Econ Theory 1:9–25, 1969), there might be a (fuzzy) game in which each of its sub-games has a non-empty core and, nevertheless, it is not a market game. It turns out that, in order to be a market game, a game needs also to be homogeneous. We also study investment games – which are fuzzy games obtained from an economy with a finite number of agents cooperating in one or more joint projects. It is argued that the usual definition of the core is inappropriate for such a model. We therefore introduce and analyze the new notion of comprehensive core. This solution concept seems to be more suitable for such a scenario. We finally refer to the notion of feasibility of an allocation in games with a large number of players. Some of the results in this paper appear in a previous draft distributed by the name “Cooperative investment games or Population games”. An anonymous referee of Economic Theory is acknowledged for his/her comments     

Incentive Mechanism Design for Production Economies with Both Private and Public Ownerships

In this paper we deal with the problem of incentive mechanism design which yields efficient allocations for general mixed ownership economies when preferences, individual endowments, and coalition patterns among individuals are unknown to the planner. We do so by doubly implementing the proportional solution for economies with any number of private sector and public sector commodities and any number of individuals as well as the coexistence of privately and publicly owned firms with general convex production possibility sets. Furthermore, the mechanisms work not only for three or more agents, but also for two-agent economies. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: C72, D61, D71, D82.     

Risk Sharing and Information in Village Economies

Arrangements for achieving efficient risk-sharing vary depending on the information available to agents in the economy. The usual Euler equation restricts efficient allocations in an economy which obeys the permanent income hypothesis, while efficient allocations in an economy with private information and long-term contracts satisfy a symmetric restriction, but not the Euler equation. Full insurance arrangements are unique in that they satisfy both restrictions.
We look at an environment in which it seems likely that long-term contracts play a role in mitigating the effects of private information: three village economies in South India. The evidence that consumption allocations satisfy the private information restriction is quite strong for households in two of the three villages; the evidence for the third village suggests that while consumption for some households satisfies the private information restrictions, other households' consumption obey the permanent income hypothesis.     

Renegotiation-Proof Dynamic Contracts with Private Information

This paper studies the issue of renegotiation in a model of dynamic moral hazard. I introduce the notion of a renegotiation-proof dynamic contract. I show that the constraint of renegotiation-proofness can have the effect of setting a higher lower bound to the set of attainable expected utilities of the agent. This result extends the notion of “credit rationing” from the static models of optimal contracting to a dynamic setting and is useful for thinking about competition for long-term contracts. This result also has implications for the long-run behavior of the expected utility of the agent under dynamic contracting. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: 026, 315.     

Optimal Taxation with Private Government Information

The Ramsey model of fiscal policy implies that taxes should be smooth in the sense of having small variances. In contrast, empirical labour tax processes are smooth in the sense of being random walks; they provide prima facie evidence for incomplete government insurance. This paper considers whether private government information might lie behind such incomplete insurance. It shows that optimal incentive compatible policies exhibit limited use of state contingent debt and greater persistence in taxes and debt, and it argues that they are better approximations to empirical fiscal policies than those implied by the Ramsey model. The paper also establishes that optimal incentive compatible allocations converge to allocations such that the government's incentive compatibility constraint no longer binds. Generally, these limiting allocations are ones in which the government is maximally indebted. Their credibility and the interaction of incentive compatibility and credibility is briefly discussed.     

Dynamic Optimal Taxation with Private Information

We study dynamic optimal taxation in a class of economies with private information. Optimal allocations in these environments are complicated and history-dependent. Yet, we show that they can be implemented as competitive equilibria in market economies supplemented with simple tax systems. The market structure in these economies is similar to that in Bewley (1986) ; agents supply labour and trade risk-free claims to future consumption, subject to a budget constraint and a debt limit. Optimal taxes are conditioned only on two observable characteristics—an agent's accumulated stock of claims, or wealth, and her current labour income. We show that optimal taxes are generally non-linear and non-separable in these variables and relate the structure of marginal wealth and income taxation to the properties of agent preferences.     

Repeated Bargaining with Persistent Private Information

The paper analyses repeated contract negotiations involving the same buyer and seller where the contracts are linked because the buyer has persistent (but not full y permanent) private information. The size of the surplus being divided is specified as a two-state Markov chain with transitions that are synchronized with contract negotiation dates. Equilibrium involves information cycles triggered by the success or failure of aggressive demands made by the seller. Because there is persistence in the Markov chain generating the surplus, a successful demand induces the seller to make another aggressive demand in the next negotiation, since the buyer's acceptance reveals that the current surplus is large. Rejection of an aggressive demand, on the other hand, leads the seller to be pessimistic about the size of the surplus in the next contract, so the seller makes a "soft" offer that is sure to be accepted. Then, after several such offers have been accepted, the seller is optimistic enough to again make an aggressive demand, creating an information cycle. An interesting feature of this cycle is that the soft price is not constant, but declines as the cycle continues, so as to offset the buyer's option value of re-starting the cycle when the current state is bad. An explicit mapping is given for the relationship between the basic parameters and the equilibrium prices and quantities; in particular, there is a closed-form solution for the threshold belief that makes the seller indifferent between hard and soft offers.     

Regulating a Monopolist with Unknown Demand: Costly Public Funds and the Value of Private Information

In this paper, we analyze the optimal regulation policy when the regulated firm has better information concerning the market demand than the regulator. We show that introducing a cost on public funds into the Planner's objective function does not lead to qualitative results similar to those obtained by introducing distributional considerations. In particular we show that under constant marginal cost the full information policy is not implementable and that the optimal regulatory policy results in informational rents. The social value of private information and the firm's informational rents are both increasing functions of the cost of the public funds.     

民营经济与政府管理的中外比较

改革开放20多年,我国国民经济以年均9．5％的速度增长,个体、私营经济的年增长速度达到20％以上。尽管民营经济占社会资源比重只有三分之一,但对GDP增长的贡献已经占到三分之二。随着民营经济的发展壮大,传统体制对民营经济发展的制约日益突出,从而阻碍了民营经济的健康良好发展。由于国外尤其是一些欧美国家市场经济体制成熟较早,他们的政府在促进与发展本国“民营经济”方面也积累了许多成功的经验,将民营经济与政府管理进行中外比较,进而借鉴先发国家的一些成熟做法,对我国民营经济的良性发展具有重大的积极意义。     

Asymmetric Tax Policy Responses in Large Economies With Cross-Border Pollution

We build a model of cross-border pollution between two large open economies, one importing the polluting good and the other exporting it, and derive their non-cooperative trade and environmental tax policies. We show among other things, that (1) in response to a bilateral reduction in trade taxes by both countries, the former country’s optimal policy is to lower its Nash emissions tax while the latter’s is to raise it, and (2) in response to an increase in emissions tax rates by both countries, the former country’s optimal reaction is to raise its Nash import tariff, while the latter’s is to reduce its Nash export tax. That is, in the present context, freer trade leads the exporting country to adopt stricter while the importing country laxer environmental tax policies.     

Price Discrimination with Private and Imperfect Information

In this paper, I investigate the competitive and welfare effects of the improvements in information accuracy in markets where firms can price discriminate after observing a private and noisy signal about a consumer's brand preference. I show that when firms believe that consumers have a brand preference for them, then they charge more to these consumers, and this price has an inverse U‐shaped relationship with the signal's accuracy. In contrast, the price charged after a disloyal signal has been observed falls as the signal's accuracy rises. While industry profit and overall welfare fall monotonically when price discrimination is based on increasingly more accurate information, the reverse happens to consumer surplus.     

Credit in a Random Matching Model with Private Information

We consider a random matching model where agents have complete access to each others' histories. Exchange is motivated by risk sharing, given random unobservable incomes. There is capital accumulation and an endogenous interest rate. The key feature of this environment is that information is mobile across locations, while there are frictions associated with transporting goods. Optimal allocations in the dynamic private information environment resemble real-world credit arrangements in that there are credit balances, credit limits, and installment payments. The steady state has the property that there is a limiting distribution of expected utility entitlements with mobility and a positive fraction of agents who are credit constrained.Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Numbers: D8, E1.     

Voluntary Participation and Provision of Public Goods in Large Finite Economies

We consider a public good provision game with voluntary participation. Agents participating in the game provide a public good and pay the fees according to a mechanism (allocation rule), while nonparticipants can free‐ride on the participants. We examine how the equilibrium public good provision level is affected by enlarging the population of an economy. We introduce a condition for an allocation rule, the asymptotic uniform continuity in replication (AUCR), which requires that small changes in the population must yield only small changes in the public good provision and which is satisfied by many mechanisms. We show that under AUCR, the equilibrium level of the public good converges to zero as the economy is replicated in the sense of Milleron.     

集聚经济与基于价值链的企业区位选择——重新发现内部集聚经济

以往集聚经济的研究多集中在以专业化、多样化等为核心的外部集聚经济,对内部集聚经济关注不足。而在"多部门企业(Multi-unit firms)"组织方式背景下,单一企业的规模经济逐渐扩展为同一集团下属企业由于共同区位带来的内部集聚经济,重新发现内部集聚经济益发重要。文章旨在以华东地区整车集团新成立企业的区位选择为例,分析内部集聚经济对企业区位选择的影响。研究发现:整车集团在某区域的从业人员总数每增加1%,该集团在该地设立下属企业的概率提升0.818%。纳入集团的初始位置、在投资地的投资时长和本地竞争等因素后,内部集聚经济的影响作用依然稳健。集团企业在同一价值链环节内部和不同价值链环节之间均会发生共同集聚。另外,加入内部集聚经济因素后,没有找到外部集聚经济稳健地影响企业区位选择的证据。     

抓住历史机遇发展民营经济

２０多年来，伴随着经济体制改革的不断深入，我国的经济结构发生了显著的变化。从GDP的构成角度看，１９８０年，我国国有经济占７８％，集体所有制经济占２０％，非公有制经济占２％；到２００１年，国有经济下降至４０％左右，集体所有制经济占３６％，而其他非公有制经济上升到２４％。新格局的形成既揭示了我国非公有制经济形式旺盛的生命力，也验证了我党多年来在完善所有制构成方面所做出的正确判断和抉择。在党的十六大会议上，江泽民同志针对现有的公有制和非公有制经济关系又做了更明确的论述：根据解放和发展生产力的要求，坚…     

Efficient Equilibria in the Voluntary Contributions Mechanism with Private Information

We characterize generally the Bayesian Nash equilibria of a voluntary contributions public goods game for two consumers with private information.The two consumers simultaneously make voluntary contributions to the public good, and the contributions are refunded if the total falls short of the cost of the public good. Several families of equilibria (step‐function, regular and semi‐regular) are studied. Necessary and sufficient conditions for regular and semi‐regular equilibrium allocations to be interim incentive efficient are derived. In the uniform distribution case we prove (i) the existence of an open set of incentive efficient regular equilibria when the cost of production is large enough and (ii) the existence of an open set of incentive efficient semi‐regular equilibria when the cost of production is low enough. Step‐function equilibra are proved to be interim incentive inefficient.     

Efficient Allocations with Hidden Income and Hidden Storage

We consider an environment in which individuals receive income shocks that are unobservable to others and can privately store resources. We provide a simple characterization of the unique efficient allocation of consumption in cases in which the rate of return on storage is sufficiently high or, alternatively, in which the worst possible outcome is sufficiently dire. We show that, unlike in environments without unobservable storage, the symmetric efficient allocation of consumption is decentralizable through a competitive asset market in which individuals trade risk-free bonds among themselves.     

Bargaining over a Common Good with Private Information*

Consider two agents who make sequential claims on a common good, receiving their respective claims only if these are compatible. We let the first mover be privately informed about the size of the good. Conventional theory predicts multiple equilibria, and the intuitive criterion predicts that the first player claims the entire good. Our experimental results reject the intuitive criterion. Private information reduces the claim and the profit of the first mover. However, we cannot reject that the subjects play according to a perfect Bayesian equilibrium (PBE). Most subjects play according to a PBE, and almost all successful coordination occurs at the even split.     

An Extension of the Trade Restrictiveness Index to Large Economies*

The Trade Restrictiveness Index (TRI) introduced by Anderson and Neary (1994 ) provided the first theoretically satisfying measure of a country’s tariff structure by overcoming the problem of ad hoc specification of indexing weights and the related index number problem. We observe, however, that the TRI may not exist or may not be unique when countries are large. As a remedy, we propose a simple extension.