Local public goods, inter-regional transfers and private information

Suppose that the centre wishes to make transfers between member states of a federation to reduce inequality. However, it lacks precise information concerning the cost differences that are responsible for the initial income inequality. We examine the implications of asymmetric information for the design of the transfer scheme. We show that if member states’ inherent cost levels as local public good providers take discrete values, the first best, or ‘complete information’, transfer scheme may or may not violate incentive compatibility. If inherent cost is a continuous random variable, such a scheme certainly violates incentive compatibility. We also explore the possibility of binding participation constraints. In our model, a binding incentive compatibility constraint leads to a reduction in effort devoted to cost reduction, and a binding participation constraint will also lead to a violation of Samuelson's optimality condition for public good provision.     

Competitive experimentation with private information: The survivor's curse

We study a winner-take-all R&D race between two firms that are privately informed about the arrival rate of an invention. Over time, each firm only observes whether the opponent left the race or not. The equilibrium displays a strong herding effect, that we call a ‘survivor's curse.’ Unlike in the case of symmetric information, the two firms may quit the race (nearly) simultaneously even when their costs and benefits for research differ significantly.     

Delay and information aggregation in stopping games with private information

We consider equilibrium timing decisions in a model with a large number of players and informational externalities. The players have private information about a common payoff parameter that determines the optimal time to invest. They learn from each other in real time by observing past investment decisions. We develop new methods of analysis for such large games, and we give a full characterization of symmetric equilibria. We show that the equilibrium statistical inferences are based on an exponential learning model. Although the beliefs converge to truth, learning takes place too late. Ex-ante welfare is strictly between that without observational learning and that with full information.     

Reputation and exogenous private learning

Short-run competitors in the chain store game receive noisy signals of the long-run incumbent firm's type. The history of signals, which in the limit is fully revealing, is observable to the competitors but possibly not to the incumbent. As long as there is sufficient noise in the signals, then in any equilibrium a patient weak incumbent obtains a payoff strictly higher than her minmax payoff.     

A theory of political cycles

We study how the proximity of elections affects policy choices in a model in which policymakers want to improve their reputation to increase their reelection chances. Policymakers' equilibrium decisions depend on both their reputation and the proximity of the next election. Typically, incentives to influence election results are stronger closer to the election (for a given reputation level), as argued in the political cycles literature, and these political cycles are less important when the policymaker's reputation is better. Our analysis sheds light on other agency relationships in which part of the compensation is decided upon infrequently.     

Dynamic signaling and market breakdown

We consider the effects a public revelation of information (e.g. rating, grade) has on trading in a dynamic signaling model. Competing buyers offer prices to a privately informed seller who can reject them and delay trade. Delay is costly and the seller has no commitment to its duration. The external public information allows for signaling in equilibrium. More interestingly, we characterize the dynamics of trade and prices. If signals are noisy, no trade takes place just before the revelation of external information. If signals are fully revealing, then trade occurs even close to revelation, however, transaction prices are discontinuous.     

A belief-based approach to the repeated prisoners' dilemma with asymmetric private monitoring

This paper extends the belief-based approach to the repeated prisoners' dilemma with asymmetric private monitoring. We first find that the previous belief-based techniques [T. Sekiguchi, Efficiency in repeated prisoners' dilemma with private monitoring, J. Econ. Theory 76 (1997) 345-361; V. Bhaskar, I. Obara, Belief-based equilibria in the repeated prisoners' dilemma with private monitoring, J. Econ. Theory 102 (2002) 40-69] cannot succeed when players' private monitoring technologies are sufficiently different. We then modify the previous belief-based approach by letting the player with smaller observation errors always randomize between cooperate and defect along the cooperative path of the play. We show that with vanishing observation errors, efficiency and a folk theorem can be approximated using our modified belief-based strategies.     

Endogenous private information structures

We formally incorporate the option to gather information into a game and thus endogenize the information structure. We ask whether models with exogenous information structures are robust with respect to this endogenization. Any Nash equilibrium of the game with information acquisition induces a Nash equilibrium in the corresponding game with an exogenous structure. We provide sufficient conditions on the structure of the game for which this remains true when ‘Nash’ is replaced by ‘sequential’. We characterize the (sequential) Nash equilibria of games with exogenous information structures that can arise as a (sequential) Nash equilibrium of games with endogenous information acquisition.     

Eliciting information from a committee

The paper addresses the mechanism design problem of eliciting truthful information from a committee of informed experts who collude in their information disclosure strategies. It is shown that under fairly general conditions full information disclosure is possible if and only if the induced outcome is Pareto undominated for the committee members.     

The relative contributions of private information sharing and public information releases to information aggregation

We calculate learning rates when agents are informed through public and private observation of other agents' actions. We characterize the evolution of the distribution of posterior beliefs. If the private learning channel is present, convergence of the distribution of beliefs to the perfect-information limit is exponential at a rate equal to the sum of the mean arrival rate of public information and the mean rate at which individual agents are randomly matched with other agents. If, however, there is no private information sharing, then convergence is exponential at a rate strictly lower than the mean arrival rate of public information.     

Coordination failure in repeated games with private monitoring

Players coordinate continuation play in repeated games with public monitoring. We investigate the robustness of such equilibrium behavior with respect to ex-ante small private-monitoring perturbations. We show that with full support of public signals, no perfect public equilibrium is robust if it induces a “regular” 2×2$2\times 2$ coordination game in the continuation play. This regularity condition is violated in all belief-free equilibria. Indeed, with an individual full rank condition, every interior belief-free equilibrium is robust. We also analyze block belief-free equilibria and point out that the notion of robustness is sensitive to whether we allow for uninterpretable signals.     

Collective decisions with interdependent valuations

Many collective decision problems have in common that individuals’ desired outcomes are correlated but not identical. This paper studies collective decisions with private information about desired policies. Each agent holds private information which mainly concerns his own bliss point, but private information also affects all other agents. We concentrate on two specific mechanism, the median and mean mechanisms establish the existence of symmetric Bayesian Nash equilibria of the corresponding games and compare the performance of the mechanisms for different degrees of interdependencies. Applications of our framework include the provision of public goods and the design of decision processes in international organizations.     

Migrant smuggling when exploitation is private information

This study contributes to the small theoretical literature on human smuggling by assuming for the first time asymmetric information in analysis. The assumption raises the possibility of an adverse selection equilibrium where only exploitative smugglers are employed at a low fee even though migrants are willing to pay non‐exploitative smugglers a high fee. More important, I find that improved inland apprehension of migrants may increase the incidence of migrant exploitation while failing to decrease smuggling attempts. Furthermore, improved border apprehension of migrants and smugglers may not affect the market at all.     

Efficiency results in N player games with imperfect private monitoring

We demonstrate that efficiency is achievable in a certain class of N player repeated games with private, almost perfect monitoring. Our equilibrium requires only one period memory and can be implemented by two state automata. Furthermore, we show that this efficiency result holds with any degree of accuracy of monitoring if private signals are hemiindependent. Whereas most existing research focuses on two player cases or only a special example of N player games, our results are applicable to a wide range of N player games of economic relevance, such as trading goods games and price-setting oligopolies.     

Role of linking mechanisms in multitask agency with hidden information

We investigate the adverse selection problem where a principal delegates multiple tasks to an agent. We characterize the virtually implementable social choice functions by using the linking mechanism proposed by Jackson and Sonnenschein (2007) [20] that restricts the message spaces. The principal does not require any incentive wage schemes and can therefore avoid any information rent and welfare loss. We show the resemblance between the functioning of this message space restriction and that of incentive wage schemes. We also extend the results of the single-agent model to the multi-agent model.     

An endogenous policy model of hierarchical government

Endogenous policy models usually neglect that government policies are frequently the result of decisions taken at different tiers by different agents, each enjoying some degree of autonomy. In this paper, policies are the outcome of the choices made by two agents within a hierarchy. A legislator decides on the budget to be successively spent by a bureaucrat. Both agents are lobbied by one or two interest groups. The combination of sequential decisionmaking and lobbying implies that the interaction between the agent at one tier and the interest group(s) depends on the exchange between the same interest group(s) and the agent at the other tier. Our results concerning multi-tier lobbying and legislatorial oversight substantially qualify the conventional wisdom related to one-tier lobbying. In particular, the reaction of the legislator to lobbying at the bureaucratic tier may make lobbying wasteful even when there is no competition from other lobbies. Moreover, the legislator benefits from lobbying only when there is competition between interest groups at the upper tier. It is also shown that competition for influence at the bureaucratic tier may work as a perfect substitute for legislatorial oversight. Extensions of the model indicate its usefulness for the analysis of decisionmaking in other multilevel governance structures, like federations or firms.     

Interregional redistribution and budget institutions under asymmetric information

Empirical evidence from the U.S. and the European Union suggests that regions which contribute to interregional redistribution face weaker borrowing constraints than regions which benefit from interregional redistribution. This paper presents an argument in favor of such differentiated budget institutions. It develops a two period model of a federation consisting of two types of regions. The federal government redistributes from one type of regions (contributors) to the other type (recipients). It is shown that a fiscal constitution with lax budget rules for contributors and strict budget rules for recipients solves the self selection problem the federal government faces in the presence of asymmetric information regarding exogenous characteristics of the regions.     

On Ramsey's conjecture: efficient allocations in the neoclassical growth model with private information

In his seminal paper of 1928, Ramsey conjectured that if agents discounted the future differently, in the long run all agents except the most patient would live at the subsistence level. The validity of this conjecture was investigated in different environments. In particular, it has been confirmed in the neoclassical growth model with dynamically complete markets. This paper studies this conjecture in a version of this model that includes private information and heterogeneous agents. A version of Bayesian implementation is introduced and a recursive formulation of the original allocation problem is established. Efficient allocations are renegotiation-proof and the expected utility of any agent cannot go to zero with positive probability if the economy does not collapse. If the economy collapses all agents will get zero consumption forever. Thus, including any degree of private information in the neoclassical growth model will deny Ramsey's conjecture, if efficient allocations are considered.     

Bargaining and inequity aversion: On the efficiency of the double auction

In a bargaining setting with asymmetrically informed, inequity-averse parties, a fully efficient mechanism (i.e., the double auction) exists if and only if compassion is strong. Less compassionate parties do not trade in the double auction in the limit of strong envy.     

Corrigendum to “School choice: An experimental study” [J. Econ. Theory 127 (1) (2006) 202-231]

We correct an inconsistency in the efficiency comparison reported in [Y. Chen, T. Sönmez, School choice: An experimental study, J. Econ. Theory 127 (1) (2006) 202-231]. The efficiency comparison of the three school choice mechanisms in our paper is based on recombinant estimation with an identical set of 10 tie-breakers, while the statistics reported in Table 7 is computed using 14,400 tie-breakers.