The Strategic Choice Of Managers And Managerial Discretion

Managerial discretion is likely to be beneficial to shareholders because of strategic cross-effects in an oligopoly. In certain circumstances, shareholders deliberately retain managerial discretion in equilibrium even when the reduction of managerial discretion is cost free. It is found that the positive effect of managerial discretion on profits can only be created by power-building (shirking) managers if quantity (price) competition prevails in the market. Consequently, the dominant strategy for the owners of a quantity- (price-) competing company is to employ a power-building (shirking) manager. The strategic effect of such a match between the type of manager and the form of competition exists for all managerial decisions as far as firms interact with each other.     

Use it or lose it

We examine the optimality of budget policies imposed by a funding authority on a bureaucrat who operates under a fixed budget. In particular, we study a “use‐it‐or‐lose‐it” (UILI) policy under which the bureaucrat has to return any unspent budget without being able to “roll over” any part to the next period. Instead of returning the unspent budget, the bureaucrat can go on a spending spree and engage in policy drift, which is inversely related to his motivation. The bureaucrat's motivation represents how well matched he is with the bureaucracy's mission. We show that a UILI policy is complementary to motivation as it has stronger ex ante positive incentive effects on more motivated bureaucrats. Such ex ante positive effects can overcome the ex post inefficiency of the policy and make a UILI policy optimal when the bureaucrat is well matched with the bureaucracy's mission or when its budget is large.     

Informational control and organizational design

This paper focuses on issues of allocating authority between an uninformed principal and an informed expert. We analyze the benefits of informational control—restricting the precision of the expert's information (without learning its content). In this case, the result of Dessein (2002) [8] that delegating decisions to a perfectly informed expert is better than communication when preferences between the expert and the principal are not too far apart is reversed. We demonstrate that these organizational forms—informational control and delegation—can be either complements or substitutes, depending on the principal's ability to affect the expert's discretion about the set of allowed policies.     

改革代价分配不公的成因与对策

发生在中国改革进程中的代价分配不公,引发了社会种种不良反应,累积成今日无法回避的社会矛盾,影响了社会的和谐与稳定。构建社会主义和谐社会,利益协调是关键。为此,就需要国家和政府通过政治、经济等方面的制度创新,建立公正合理的改革代价分配机制,有效地协调由更深刻的利益格局调整所引发的社会各阶层之间的利益矛盾。     

Persistent media bias

The news media plays an essential role in society, but surveys indicate that the public views the media as biased. This paper presents a theory of media bias that originates with private information obtained by journalists through their investigations and persists despite profit-maximizing news organizations and rivalry from other news organizations. Bias has two effects on the demand for news. First, rational individuals are more skeptical of potentially biased news and thus rely less on it in their decision-making. This skepticism reduces demand and leads the news organization to set a lower price for its publication the greater is the bias it tolerates. Lower quality news thus commands a lower price. Second, bias makes certain stories more likely than others. Given their private information, journalists may bias their stories if their career prospects can be advanced by being published on the front page. News organizations can control bias by restricting the discretion allowed to journalists, but granting discretion and tolerating bias can increase profits if it allows journalists to be hired at a lower wage. Bias is not driven from the market by a rival news organization nor by a news organization with an opposing bias, and the profits of a high-bias news organization can be higher than the profits of a low bias one. Moreover, bias can be greater with competition than with a monopoly news organization. If individuals collectively choose regulation in place of their individual decision-making, bias increases the expected stringency of regulation.     

Optimal fiscal and monetary policies in the face of rare disasters

This paper studies optimal fiscal and monetary policies in an economy exposed to large adverse shocks (rare disasters). We contrast optimal policies under commitment and discretion and identify several striking differences between these institutional environments. A government that can commit to its policy plans relies heavily on debt to smooth the adverse effects of large shocks over time. Lack of commitment seriously limits the government's ability to use debt as a shock absorber. Under discretion, an increase in debt leads to an increase in inflation expectations and therefore higher nominal interest rate distortions. Hence, the discretionary government keeps debt in close vicinity of its steady-state level, and the response of taxes, inflation, and interest rates to shocks is much more pronounced under discretion than under commitment. This is particularly relevant for large shocks and when the initial stock of government debt is already high at the time the shock occurs. We also argue that the adverse welfare effects of disasters are larger under discretion than under commitment, but these welfare differentials can be significantly reduced by making the discretionary government inflation averse.     

Endogenous Public Policy, Politicization and Welfare

In the two–stage political–economic game that we study public policy is the outcome of the interaction between interest groups and a two–tier government. Implementation of a policy proposed by a bureaucrat requires approval by an elected politician. The objective function of the bureaucrat hinges on the weight assigned to social welfare relative to the rent–seeking outlays of the interest groups. This weight represents the degree of politicization of the government. Our main result is that, in contrast to common belief, increased politicization need not adversely affect the public well–being.     

群体规范、集体行动发生与共享资源合作治理

特定群体面临共享资源自发治理的需求时,需要通过群体合作的集体行动来实现,因而集体行动的主要特征是共享资源治理的成本分摊和收益分享问题。本文从近年来逐渐受到重视的群体规范对于集体行动实现的影响机制入手,在清晰界定群体规范的含义基础上分析其在集体行动中的作用机制,并且通过模型说明群体规范的内生性形成问题,从而完整的得出群体规范促进集体行动实现的一般性理论,以期对当今社会和谐治理给出政策含义。     

Timeless perspective versus discretionary policymaking when the degree of inflation persistence is unknown

One major strand in optimal monetary policy analysis considers the robustness of alternative policies under model uncertainty. Another has focused on the appropriate perspective for optimal monetary policy, namely discretion or the timeless perspective (TP). The paper bridges these two parallel lines of research by assessing the welfare consequences of both policy perspectives in the presence of misperceptions about the degree of intrinsic inflation persistence. Contrary to most standard results, discretion can be the more robust perspective, the reason being that the TP exploits the expectations channel. With misperceptions this leads to large deteriorations in welfare.     

Endogenous timing,strategic tariff game and bilateral trade in vertical oligopoly

This paper builds an observable delay game in endogenous timing to study the possible occurrence of trade wars in a vertical, bilateral trade model. It examines the effects of production cost differences and order of moves on optimal tariffs, market equilibria, dumping margin and social welfare in both fixed timing and endogenous timing games. In a fixed timing game, it shows that price dumping in the intermediate good market arises from differences in country-specific final good production costs. Different from Bernhofen (1995; Journal of International Economics), trade costs resulting from reciprocal tariffs in upstream markets can reverse the price dumping under certain conditions. In an endogenous timing game, this paper finds that the magnitude of cost differences significantly influences countries’ decisions on the order of moves in a strategic tariff-making game. Both countries want to be the first movers under a small cost difference and consequently reach a simultaneous equilibrium result. This demonstrates that the second-best equilibrium proceeds under certain conditions. Under a large cost difference, sequential policy-making is the subgame perfect Nash equilibrium. If the cost difference is sufficiently large, both countries have an incentive to launch a trade war as a multiple equilibrium game.     

创新型大企业评价体系中评价指标筛选的阶段式综合算法

建设创新型大企业是全面提高我国企业国际竞争力的有效手段,而其内部建立科学的评价体系就需要筛选出最优的评价指标集合,因此提出阶段式综合算法,分5个阶段综合运用专家排除法、特征值法、集值迭代法和最小均方差法筛选,用综合赋权法确定指标的权重,为创新型大企业建立科学的评价指标体系奠定了算法基础。     

A comparison of citizen and “expert” preferences using an attribute-based approach to choice

This paper explores whether expert judgements can be taken as a proxy for citizen preferences for determining investment strategies for public goods. As an illustration, we focus on the provision of Public Rights Of Way (PROW) by Local Government Authorities in England. These provide rights of passage over property to those other than the owners, and little information is available on the welfare effects of changes in the provision and use of PROW. Given limited funds, reliance on expert judgement could be a cost effective alternative for decision-making compared with stated preference surveys of citizens. Two methods are compared. The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is used to elicit expert judgement to proxy citizen preferences for different attributes of PROW. The Choice Experiment (CE) technique is then used to derive preferences directly through personal interviews with citizens. Overall it was found that judicious use of AHP by experts can, in this instance, be used to represent citizen views. However, this result may not be easily generalisable to other settings.     

Imperfect verification,appeals, and limited liability

We examine the effect of an imperfect verification and a subsequent appeals process in regulatory settings where legal or institutional restrictions impose an upper bound on penalties. We show that the verification always enhances social welfare despite the limit on penalties. The subsequent appeals process, which allows the firm to challenge an unfavorable finding by the regulator, is never socially optimal when it is costless. However, when the appeals process is costly, it can be optimal even if it is less accurate than the verification. Moreover, social welfare can increase as the cost of the appeals process increases.     

MONETARY–FISCAL INTERACTIONS WITH A CONSERVATIVE CENTRAL BANK

We study macroeconomic stabilization when monetary and fiscal policies interact via their effects on output and inflation and the monetary authority is more conservative than the fiscal. We find that monetary–fiscal interactions result in poor macroeconomic stabilization. With both policies discretionary, the Nash equilibrium is suboptimal with higher output and lower inflation than optimal; the Nash equilibrium may be extreme with output higher and inflation lower than either authority want. Leadership equilibria are not second best. Monetary commitment is completely negated by fiscal discretion and yields the same outcome as discretionary monetary leadership for all realizations of shocks. But fiscal commitment is not similarly negated by monetary discretion. Optimal macroeconomic stabilization requires either commitment of both monetary and fiscal policies, or identical targets for both authorities – output socially optimal and inflation appropriately conservative – or complete separation of tasks.     

Influence of market-level and inter-firm differences in costs on product positioning and pricing

The objective of this article is to study the impact of differentiation and firm positioning on firm’s pricing decisions in a horizontally differentiated competitive market. We build a parsimonious game-theoretic model and analyse simultaneous entry of firms. The effect of differentiation is modelled as an additional cost incurred by both firms based on the degree of differentiation between the firms. The cost of positioning is modelled as a market level cost affecting both firms whereby firms incur a cost if they want to position themselves away from the centre of distribution of consumers. Our analysis provides some surprising results, explains some conflicting empirical observations documented in previous research and may also be useful for further empirical research in this area by providing sharper predictions about the impact of various types of costs on market outcomes. For example, we find that if the cost of positioning is sufficiently high, then a firm with lower cost of differentiation charges a higher price in equilibrium, even when no differences in exogenous costs exist. We also find that under some circumstances the cost disadvantaged firm can enjoy higher price-cost margins compared to the cost leader thereby suggesting that higher costs could be a blessing in disguise.     

The economics of information: An exposition

The study of information as a choice variable has been given much more weight by disciplines other than economics. This paper tries to lay out the essential economic characteristics of information as an economic commodity. It discusses the reasons why usual market analysis fails and some of the problems that information creates for industrial structure. It is the treatment of information as a variable and its implications for economic behavior that needs further analysis. This is done by giving a formal statement of the role of information in economic decisions based on the use of information and applying it to specific forms of payoff and cost functions. That in many cases information is about rates leads to the conclusion that the value of new technical information is related to the scale of operation. Once information has been obtained its transmission is easy. Therefore it is difficult to make information into property and the incentives to create it will be lacking. In general the analysis shows that the special properties of information as an economic good have strong implications for the very role and meaning of the firm.I want to acknowledge the support of a grant from the Sloan Foundation     

Monetary policy,fiscal policy and cross signal jamming

This paper considers the issue of rule versus discretion when the central bank and the government share private information but have different preferences over inflation and output. We demonstrate that if the monetary policy is rule-based, Intuitive Criterion selects the unique separating equilibrium in which the central bank signals a low supply shock by a low interest rate. Interestingly, discretion may be better than the rule for the central bank, contrary to the case of complete information. Also, we examine the effect of information asymmetry on the monetary and fiscal policy mix. We show that cross signal jamming whereby the monetary authority and the fiscal authority successfully jams an unfavorable signal of each other does not occur in equilibrium.     

Taylor Rule implementation of the optimal policy at the zero lower bound: Does the cost channel matter?

This paper analyzes the implementation of the optimal policies at the Zero Lower Bound (ZLB) by the Taylor rule in the presence of a cost channel. We find that, the presence of a cost channel significantly impairs the ability of the Taylor rule to implement optimal policies when economy is subject to the ZLB. The main findings of the paper are, (i) the Taylor rule with optimally chosen inflation target partially implements the optimal discretionary policy but cannot implement the optimal policy under commitment, and (ii) the T-only policy, which follows discretion after an optimally chosen exit date from the ZLB, is the best that can be implemented by the Taylor rule in the presence of cost channel.     

Bureaucratic Advice and Political Governance

This paper studies the conflict of interest between politicians and better-informed bureaucrats when they have differing preferences over a public project. We start with a baseline model where a bureaucrat advises a single decision maker (politician) whether to adopt a project. The bureaucrat can be punished if his misrepresentation of the project is detected. We extend this to multiple projects and multiple bureaucrats, and compare the level of Type I and Type II errors generated with centralized and decentralized decision making. This typically depends on the form of the distribution function that determines the bureaucrats' expectation of being disciplined.     

Exploring the impact of economic integration agreements through extreme bounds analysis

This article provides an empirical strategy guided by the data to estimate the effects of Economic Integration Agreements (EIAs) on trade flows and their transitional dynamics. The strategy uses Extreme Bounds Analysis (EBA) to guide the choice of lags and leads in the effects without researchers' discretion involved. We show that arbitrarily selected year intervals and starting year can result in non-robust estimates of transitional dynamics of the effects of EIAs on trade flows. The empirical strategy follows two steps: EBA first sifts lags and leads of EIAs robustly related to trade flows from candidates, then these are included in the gravity equation to estimate the effects of EIAs on trade. We find that various lags and leads are robustly and positively related to trade flows, and the lag and lead structure depends on the level of integration. Our results show that EIAs have a long-term effect of 63% on trade flows. Under the richer lag and lead structure, deep-integration agreements beyond the level of free trade agreements have a much higher impact on trade flows than free trade agreements do (132% vs 31%). The estimates of effects of EIAs obtained from EBA-based estimation have a smaller contemporaneous effect and larger phased-in effects compared to previous studies relying on the subjective choices of year intervals while similar results are observed with the decomposed EIAs.