Pigouvian Taxes Under Imperfect Competition If Consumption Depends on Emissions

The paper considers environmental regulation of a consumption good and an externality which influence demand and costs in a nonseparable way. Under monopoly two instruments are always required for first-best. The Pigouvian tax is more complicated than anticipated.     

Constant-utility paths in a resource-based economy

This paper analyzes a social planner's solution in a resource-based economy under a constant-utility criterion. The utility function includes social progress in a multiplicative form. The resulting paths of consumption include the patterns of growth that are conventionally used in the literature. A closed form solution, derived for the Dasgupta-Heal-Solow (DHS) model, includes the Solow–Hartwick result as a special case. This paper extends the link between the utilitarian criterion and the maximin for the cases with finite elasticity of marginal utility. The result also implies that economic growth in a resource-based economy may be slower than exponential; therefore, the expression for utility with social progress may become a more appropriate measure of sustainable growth than the percentage of consumption growth.     

Associated consistency and equal allocation of nonseparable costs

Summary. We modified the definition of associated game with respect to Hamiache (2001) to characterize the equal allocation of nonseparable costs (EANS) by means of Pareto Optimality(PO), Translation Covariance (TC), Symmetry (SYM), Associated Consistency(AC) and Continuity(CONT).Received: 8 April 2004, Revised: 9 May 2005, JEL Classification Numbers: C71.The author is indebted to Clement Wen for many helpful comments and he is also very grateful to a referee who proposed several helpful comments to improve the paper.     

A class of multiattribute utility functions

A function u(z) is a utility function if u′(z) > 0. It is called risk averse if we also have u′′(z) < 0. Some authors, however, require that u ⁽ⁱ⁾(z) > 0 if i is odd and u ⁽ⁱ⁾(z) < 0 if i is even. The notion of a multiattribute utility function can be defined by requiring that it is increasing in each variable and concave as an s-variate function. A stronger condition, similar to the one in case of a univariate utility function, requires that, in addition, all partial derivatives of total order m should be positive if m is odd and negative if m is even. In this paper, we present a class of functions in analytic form such that each of them satisfies this stronger condition. We also give sharp lower and upper bounds for E[u(X ₁,... , X _s )] under moment information with respect to the joint probability distribution of the random variables X ₁,... , X _s assumed to be discrete and representing wealths. Partially supported by OTKA grants F-046309 and T-047340 in Hungary.     

回到边沁抑或超越边沁?——经济学效用概念的"返本"与"开新"

经济学中的效用概念最初是以幸福为基本内涵而建立起来的,然而由于随后经济学发展的自然科学化倾向,效用逐渐被简化和庸俗化为以货币来衡量的欲望满足程度,经济学自身也逐渐偏离了它的本质和初衷——保持和增进人类幸福。为了改变经济学的不幸福现状,一些学者开始着手进行经济学的幸福革命,效用作为经济学的一个基本概念,自然是重点革命对象。继卡内曼提出经验效用概念、呼吁回到边沁、恢复效用的幸福内涵之后,弗雷等人又提出过程效用的概念,认为还应超越边沁,关注效用的过程之维。过程效用概念的提出及其研究不仅是一次重要的理论创新,而且还具有重大的现实意义和公共政策价值。     

中国农村居民效用测算研究——基于综合比例效用恒等式的检验及应用

文章基于西方经济学主流效用理论对消费者的效用测算问题没有给出明确答案这一事实,探索构建比例效用理论推导综合比例效用恒等式,并利用我国2001-2010年27个省份农村居民收入消费数据的面板SUR模型对综合比例效用恒等式进行了验证,同时测算了农村居民效用水平。结果显示:(1)农村居民效用水平在2001-2005年间较高,但下降趋势明显,2006-2010年间保持稳中略升;(2)河南、西藏和四川长期处于消费不足状态,山东长期处于消费过度状态;(3)中等收入省份农村居民消费潜力最大。     

Some Insights on Religion from Public Goods Economics

This paper provides a theoretical discussion on what analytical insight is gained by viewing religion as both a pure and impure public good. It suggests that organized religion converts a public good into an excludable club good and can be viewed as providing both an access regime for this club good as well as acting as an intermediary. Interestingly, this drives a wedge between the ardent and moderate adherents of a religion. It also presents an analysis of trust in social relationships when organized religion works to provide a credible signal of trustworthiness.     

精益生产对成本管理的影响

精益生产是一种以最大限度地减少企业生产所占用的资源、降低企业管理和运营成本为主要目的的生产方式,是众多企业追逐的经营管理理念。基于此,从精益生产理论体系入手,分析了传统成本管理的缺陷,进而对精益生产模式下的成本管理框架进行探讨。     

边际效用价值论与劳动价值论的统一——兼论边际效用价值论100年的弯路

劳动价值论和边际效用价值论是从不同角度对社会财富和商品价值的度量,劳动价值论成为了分析社会结构的基础,而边际效用价值论不具备这种功能,并走上了100年的弯路;本文证明了:社会总效用量与社会总劳动耗费量的统一,商品的边际效用与生产商品的社会必要劳动时间的统一,以及总量与个量计量的统一.对两种价值论统一性的论证,进一步证明劳动价值理论及其作为社会经济结构分析基础的正确性.     

Expected utility theory and experimental utility measurement, 1950–1985. From confidence to scepticism

Abstract

The paper reconstructs the history of the experimental attempts to measure the cardinal utility of money between 1950 and 1985 within the framework provided by expected utility theory (EUT). It is shown that this history displays a definite trajectory: from the confidence in EUT and the EUT-based measurement of utility of the 1950s to the scepticism that, from the mid-1970s, haunted the validity of EUT as well as the significance of the utility measures obtained through it. By exploring the diverse aspects and causes of this trajectory, the paper covers new ground in the history of both decision theory and utility measurement.     

Subjective recursive expected utility

We axiomatize a subjective version of the recursive expected utility model. This development extends the seminal results of Kreps and Porteus (Econometrica 46:185–200 (1978)) to a subjective framework and provides foundations that are easy to relate to axioms familiar from timeless models of decision making under uncertainty. Our analysis also clarifies what is needed in going from a represention that applies within a single filtration to an across filtration representation.Part of this research was conducted when Ozdenoren visited MEDS in Fall 2003. We thank Tapas Kundu, Costis Skiadas, Jean-Marc Tallon and Tan Wang for helpful discussions and also thank audiences at Koc University, Northwestern University, the CERMSEM conference “ Mathematical Models in Decision Theory” at Universite Paris I, and the FUR XI conference on foundations and applications of utility, risk and decision theory     

Experienced versus decision utility: large-scale comparison for income–leisure preferences*

Subjective well-being (SWB) data are increasingly used to perform welfare analysis. Interpreted as “experienced utility”, it has recently been compared to “decision utility” using small-scale experiments most often based on stated preferences. We transpose this comparison to the framework of non-experimental and large-scale data commonly used for policy analysis, focusing on the income–leisure domain where redistributive policies operate. Using the British Household Panel Survey, we suggest a “deviation” measure, which is simply the difference between actual working hours and SWB-maximizing hours. We show that about three-quarters of individuals make decisions that are not inconsistent with maximizing their SWB. We discuss the potential channels that explain the lack of optimization when deviations are significantly large. We find proxies for a number of individual and external constraints, and show that constraints alone can explain more than half of the deviations. In our context, deviations partly reflect the inability of the revealed preference approach to account for labor market rigidities, so the actual and SWB-maximizing hours should be used in a complementary manner. The suggested approach based on our deviation metric could help identify labor market frictions.     

Simple Utility Functions with Giffen Demand

Simple utility functions with the Giffen property are presented: locally, the demand curve for a good is upward sloping. The utility functions represent continuous, monotone, convex preferences.     

Theories of choice under risk: Insights from financial markets

To date, the plausibility of theories of choice under risk hinges are mainly on experimental evidence. This paper devises and implements an approach amenable of assessing the performance of three families of models (expected utility, rank-dependent expected utility, and the cumulative prospect theory) using information from financial asset markets. Our findings unequivocally support reference-point dependence, diminishing marginal sensitivity, loss aversion, and nonlinear weighting of (gain and loss) physical probabilities. The empirical observations are found to be robust to, inter alia, the parameterization of the utility and probability weighting functions, “day-of-the-week effects”, the choice of a reference point, and the introduction of possible, low-probability market crashes (peso component).