Tournaments of Weakly Heterogeneous Players

We consider three prominent tournament formats—contests, binary elimination tournaments, and round-robin tournaments—in the case when players are heterogeneous in their abilities but the heterogeneity is, in a well-defined sense, weak. Using linear approximation, we characterize equilibrium strategies and payoffs in the three tournament games and compare them to the benchmark symmetric case of identical players. We describe small deviations from the symmetric equilibria by elasticities of a player's equilibrium effort with respect to her own ability and the abilities of her rivals. Our results only require general symmetry and smoothness assumptions but not specific functional forms for the probabilities of winning in tournaments. We show that, in equilibrium: (i) a player's effort and payoff depend on her rivals' abilities in a model-independent way, either through the average ability of the field (for static games), or through the properly discounted average ability of the field (for dynamic elimination tournaments); (ii) players respond stronger to changes in their own relative abilities than to changes in their rivals' relative abilities; (iii) aggregate effort (dissipated rent) does not change compared to the benchmark case; (iv) it is not possible to manipulate aggregate effort through seeding in binary elimination tournaments, although optimal seeding schemes for other purposes can be identified; and (v) balanced seeding and a uniform distribution of relative abilities cancel out the dependence of a player's effort on her rivals' abilities in binary elimination tournaments.     

The Virtue of Installing Veto Players

This paper shows that the wisdom of many Founding Fathers of installing separate legislation powers to prevent each other from corrupt practices is at most only partially justified. Given the same culture, a political institution with veto players to counterbalance its multi-party legislature enables its legislative coalitions to extract larger amounts of bribes from interest groups than the one without such counterbalance veto players . This finding explains the rampant scandals of colossal bribes in regimes where an authoritarian president, prime minister, or party leader of the chronical dominant party, or a bicameral system is prevalent. Technically, this paper extends the weighted value allocation under a preset coalitional structure of the players to an apex game.     

Competing Against Experienced and Inexperienced Players

In certain markets success may depend on how well participants anticipate the behavior of other participants who have varying amounts of experience. Understanding if and how peoples behavior depends on competitors level of experience is important since in most markets participants have varying amounts of experience. Examining data from two new experimental studies similar to the beauty contest game first studied by Nagel (1995), the results indicate that (1) players with no experience behave the same against competitors with and without experience but (2) players quickly learn to condition their behavior on competitors experience level, causing (3) behavior to stop moving toward the equilibrium whenever new players enter the game and (4) experienced players to earn more money than less experienced players. The paper discusses the implications of the results for understanding and modeling behavior in markets in which participants have different amounts of experience.This revised version was published online in May 2005 with corrections to the acknowledgements.     

The demand for divisia M1, M2, and M3 in the United States

This paper analyzes the demand for broad money measures and estimates the degree of substitution between Divisia money, defined from narrow to broad, and the “nested like assets” at different levels of aggregation. The analysis is conducted within a microtheoretical framework-utilizing the demand-system approach- and makes use of the Strotz-Gorman multistage optimization framework. Another pleasing feature of our approach is the systematic testing for the appropriateness of the weak separability (aggregation) conditions at the various levels of aggregation.     

International Development Strategies of Luxury-goods Players in China

The aim of this paper is to study and analyse the intemationalisation strategies chosen by the main luxury-goods players in the Chinese market, demonstrating the business intemationalisation processes. The research questions are： ttow luxury companies have developed distribution strategies in the Chinese markets？ What are the main formats of distribution for the Chinese markets？ Are there any differences in the internationalization process between the main players of the luxury markets and the smaller ones？ The methodology is based on the analysis on multiple-case ~.nalysis on a sample of luxury-goods companies and identifies and compares the different strategies used by the players analysed. The research process starts from identifying and selecting the most well-known companies operating in the luxury branded sector, which have established a presence in the Chinese market with their own brand, collecting secondary data for the selected companies （website, corporate profile, articles on websites and in trade magazines and interviews with the management）, analysing the data collected and interpreting the main results to have emerged from the research. The main findings and conclusions are that the route to development in the Chinese market taken by the players in the luxury-goods sector, historically undertaken by delocalising production operations, has in recent years begun to accelerate with new forms in play, principally linked to distribution. The Chinese market tbr luxury brands is ever more an outlet market rather than a production hub. The ability to create brand awareness will become a key factor for successful consolidation of the competitive position in this market, an operation that can only be performed through distribution. Moreover, Chinese high-end consumers are becoming ever more demanding, seeking out an ever more sophisticated shopping experience. Just as happening in other markets, opening directly operated stores is a strategic choice for reaching and convincing end-consumers, sinc     

Veto Players and Central Bank Gold Sales

This paper offers a critique of the increasingly prevalent argument that the late twentieth century saw a ‘financialisation’ of capitalism anchored in the USA, the UK, and other leading Western economies. The objective of the paper is not to claim that there has been no such structural mutation, but that the studies which allegedly demonstrate this mutation are compromised by the anaemic geographies that structure and animate them. Such studies, the paper argues, fetishise the national scale and, in doing so, offer a restricted and potentially misleading reading of trends such as, most notably, historic growth in the share of corporate profits accruing to ‘finance’ within individual countries. Examining empirical data for the UK, but explicitly incorporating the international perspective typically missing from existing studies of financialisation, the paper points to the vital role of international expansion by UK financial institutions in growing the financial sector's share of profits. Whether so-called ‘financialisation’ has also contributed to this growth remains, the paper submits, open to question.     

Correcting NDP for SO2 and NOx Emissions: Implementation of a Theoretical Model in Practice

The theoretical and the practical studies in the field of environmental accounting are often two separate lines of work. In this study, we develop an optimal control theory model for adjusting NDP for the effects of SO₂ and NO_x emissions, and subsequently insert empirically estimated values. The model includes correction entries for the effects on welfare, real capital, health and the quality and quantity of renewable natural resources. In the empirical valuation study, production losses were estimated with dose-response functions. Recreational and other welfare values were estimated by the contingent valuation (CV) method. Effects on capital depreciation are also included. For comparison, abatement costs and environmental protection expenditures for reducing sulfur and nitrogen emissions were estimated. The theoretical model was then utilized to calculate the adjustment to NDP in a consistent manner. The estimated damage value of sulfur is close to the Swedish sulfur tax.     

Extensive Form Games with Uncertainty Averse Players

Nash equilibrium presumes that the beliefs of a player are represented by a probability measure. Motivated by the Ellsberg Paradox and relevant experimental findings demonstrating that this representation of beliefs may be unrealistic, this paper generalizes Nash equilibrium in finite extensive form games to allow for preferences conforming to the multiple priors model developed by Gilboa and Schmeidler [Journal of Mathematical Economics, 18 (1989), 141–153]. The implications of this generalization for strategy choices and welfare are studied. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: C72, D81.     

市场主体多元化与地方政府职能定位

政府功能的大小,是不以人的意志为转移的,它是由特定的技术及经济背景下社会对政府的需要决定的。我国已经从计划经济体制向市场经济体制转变,目前正处于不断发展、完善阶段,市场经济在中国已成为一个不可逆转的事实和进程。中国地方政府设有省、地级市、县、乡(镇)四级,每级政府职能又有其特殊性。地级市、县直接面对基层企事业单位和广大农村,具有管理政治、经济、文化等多项事物的完整职能,是机构设置齐全的行政建制;与之匹配的地方政府则是担负着落实党和国家的方针政策,直接为本区域经济建设和人民生活提供良好外部环境和各种社会服务…     

Bayesian Estimation of Entry Games with Multiple Players and Multiple Equilibria

Entry game models are often used to study the nature of firms' profits and the nature of competition among firms in empirical studies. However, when there are multiple players in an oligopoly market, the resulting multiple equilibria have made it difficult in previous studies to estimate the payoff functions of players in complete information, static and discrete games without using unreasonable assumptions. To overcome this difficulty, the present paper proposes a practical estimation method for an entry game with three players using a Bayesian approach. Some mild assumptions are imposed on the payoff function, and the average competitive effect is used to capture the entry effect of the number of firms. Our proposed methodology is applied to Japanese airline data from the year 2000, when there were three major airline companies, ANA, JAL and JAS. The model comparison is conducted to investigate the nature of strategic interaction among these Japanese airline companies.     

EQUITY AND EFFECTIVENESS OF POSSIBLE CO2 TREATY PROPOSALS

The Montreal Protocol on chlorofluorocarbon control established an important precedent for global environmental treaties that include both developing countries and industrial countries. This paper evaluates seven possible treaty proposals to control carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions. Growth-rate control proposals fail on effectiveness of control or on equity differences between developing countries and industrial countries. Complex proposals link policies in population growth, economic development, world energy taxation, and forestation. These complex proposals, which appear to be both effective and equitable, can defer or avoid CO2 doubling.     

健全市场主体 完善市场经济体制

完善我国市场经济体制,必须以健全市场主体为核心.为了健全市场主体,应进一步创新关于市场主体的理论,同时必须采取一系列新的举措:改革和完善国有资产管理体制,健全国有控股和参股的市场主体;加快推进基础设施和公用事业领域的改革,扩大非国有市场主体的参与范围;以资本市场的建设为重点,完善生产要素市场体系,为市场主体提供完善的载体;转变政府职能,深化行政管理体制改革,为市场主体创造良好的外部环境.     

Working and Shirking: Equilibrium in Public-Goods Games with Overlapping Generations of Players

In overlapping-generations models of public-goods provision,in which the contribution decision is binary and lifetimes arefinite, the set of symmetric subgame-perfect equilibria canbe categorized into three types: seniority equilibria, in whichplayers contribute (effort) until a predetermined age and thenshirk thereafter; dependency equilibria, in which players initiallyshirk, then contribute for a set number of periods, then shirkfor the remainder of their lives; and sabbatical equilibria,in which players alternately contribute and shirk for periodsof varying length before entering a final stage of shirking.In a world without discounting we establish conditions for equilibriumand demonstrate that for any dependency equilibrium there isa seniority equilibrium that Pareto dominates it ex ante. Weproceed to characterize generational preferences over alternativeseniority equilibria. We explore the aggregation of these preferencesby embedding the public-goods provision game in a voting frameworkand solving for the majority-rule equilibria. In this way wecan think of political processes as providing one natural frameworkfor equilibrium selection in the original public-goods provisiongame.     

森林资源产权市场主体培育的制度障碍分析

在培育森林资源产权市场主体的过程中面临着许多制度障碍,包括相关法律的缺失,森林资源管理制度、组织制度、林业融资制度和社会保障制度的制约等.为此,要进行制度创新,突破制约森林资源产权市场主体培育的制度障碍.     

CO2 abatement policy with learning-by-doing in renewable energy

This paper analyzes the implications of CO₂ abatement when there is endogenous technological change in renewable energy. A multi-sector numerical general equilibrium model for Denmark is proposed to reflect two basic assumptions about technological progress in renewable energy. First, there is learning-by-doing and unit costs of production are a decreasing function of cumulated output. Second, technological progress only benefits new vintages of capital. The learning-by-doing process is calibrated to match current projections for technological progress in wind-based electricity. The implications are a marked reduction in the total and marginal cost of abatement and a decline in the optimal level of near-term abatement.     

从均衡走向演化--经济学范式的演进

均衡与演化的思想很早就共生于经济思想史中。自亚当·斯密以来,经济学深受物理学的影响,一直被均衡思想和范式所支配,并由此建立了以均衡分析为核心的经济分析体系;进入20世纪80年代后,演化思想又促使人们在主流经济体系之外发展起来了经济演化理论。本文旨在对均衡和演化这两大截然不同的经济范式的演进进行剖析,从中我们不难看出:从均衡走向演化的范式变迁折射着两种经济思想交锋的历程和对以新古典经济学为代表的主流经济分析模式的超越。     

OFFSETTING NEW CO2 EMISSIONS: A RATIONAL FIRST GREENHOUSE POLICY STEP

This paper describes and assesses a policy to slow the increase of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in the atmosphere. Policy governing new CO₂ sources would either prevent emissions, procure compensating emissions reductions, or sequester emissions in sinks. The paper uses electric power plants to demonstrate the mechanics of the policy and the control or offset choices. Offset options include scrubbing, fuel switching, investments in energy conservation and efficiency, and afforestation.
Costs per ton ofC0₂ sequestered range from $1.35 for planting shade trees to $59.41 for scrubbing. All options except scrubbing cost less than $11.00, and the median cost is around $6.00 per ton removed. Planting trees on erodible cropland in conjunction with the Conservation Reserve Program combines the goals of reduced erosion, surplus agricultural production, and greenhouse warming. This policy is a first sane step toward reducing the accumulation of greenhouse gases. Having an international framework for managing emissions is most desirable. In the interim, however, the United States can demonstrate environmental leadership, generate substantial conservation benefits, and spark ingenuity in searching for alternatives, broadening the options, and lowering the ultimate costs of reducing CO₂ emissions.     

近代会计进化论--第二次科技革命与近代会计的历史演进

近代会计是由簿记进化而来，并随着科学技术发展，社会经济环境的变化逐步进化。其进化内容主要为会计社会职业的成长，会计规范机制的创新、公认会计原则的形成，会计学科体系的产生，会计报表重心转移和合并会计报表的形成等。其进化的推动力是科技革命引发的经济发展，其内在动力是其内部机制的成熟。其进化是一个历史的过程，进化的终极是现代会计。