Maritime trade and migratory species management to protect biodiversity

Invasive species threaten biodiversity worldwide. Ships inadvertently carry marine invasive species to vulnerable ports. An empirical game theoretic analysis is presented to explore this transboundary biological pollution topic. This analysis utilizes data on marine invasive species and maritime trade as a vector of impact on native species at different public port locations along the Pacific coast of the North American countries. Preventative and reactive abatement strategies are compared. The countries are not identical and a comparison of noncooperative game strategies and payoffs to the cooperative game is presented. With the asymmetry between countries, optimal sharing rules are quantified. Results show that cooperative and preventative abatement is optimal compared to all other strategies dealing with stock and flow pollution.      

Employee benefit plans need to protect privacy of participant information

Employee benefit plans need to examine their privacy policies and practices. Three areas of privacy compliance plan administrators should review are the HIPAA privacy regulations, state law claims against employee benefit plans for invasion of privacy and Web site privacy policies.     

我国征用土地与保护农民利益问题研究

在城市化进程中,城市周边农民由于土地的大量征用,正在成为城市中新的弱势群体,他们的生存和发展状况直接影响到社会的和谐稳定和经济的进一步健康发展,这已成为一个比较突出的社会问题.本文对征地过程中行政权的滥用,导致国家、用地人及被征用人之间的利益冲突做了调查分析,反思了现行的相关法律和政策及土地制度安排,并提出了相应的对策,以便平衡失地农民与当前城市化过程中的关系,构建和谐社会,促进城市化稳定发展.     

Responsiveness to priority-based affirmative action policy in school choice

We consider the priority-based affirmative action policy in school choice. We weaken the responsiveness to affirmative action policy by requiring at least one minority student to be weakly better off when their priorities are improved. We find that under both the student-proposing deferred acceptance mechanism and the top trading cycles mechanism at least one minority student becomes weakly better off when their priorities are improved. We also strengthen the responsiveness to affirmative action policy by requiring all minority students to be weakly better off when their priorities are improved. We call this property strict responsiveness to affirmative action policy. We find that there is no nonwasteful, individually rational, mutually best, and strategy-proof mechanism that is strictly responsive to affirmative action policy. We then find a sufficient condition for the affirmative action policy to satisfy for the student-proposing deferred acceptance mechanism to be strictly responsive to affirmative action policy by setting restrictions on the priority improvements made by the policy.     

Heterogeneity, returns to scale, and collective action

Abstract .  I analyze the effects of resource inequality and valuation heterogeneity on the provision of public goods with increasing or decreasing returns to scale in production. The existing literature typically takes the agents' characteristics as given and known to the researcher. In contrast, this paper compares collective action provision across groups of agents with resources and valuations for the public good drawn from different known joint distributions. Specifically, I characterize the expected equilibrium public good level as function of various distributional properties and moments. A resource-valuation distribution that first-order stochastically dominates another distribution always results in higher expected public good provision level, independent of the production technology. With decreasing returns to scale in the public good production, higher resource inequality results in higher expected provision. With increasing returns the same result holds when the mean resource level is relatively low, but expected provision decreases in inequality when the mean resource level is high. A parallel result holds for agents' valuations.