Policy Bias Equivalence under Common Agency

This paper studies interest group influence on policy making. Lobbying occurs in a first price auction where an interest group wins with certainty, if her bid exceeds the loser’s bid by the policy maker’s valuation for the socially best policy. Otherwise the latter implements the privately known best policy. In equilibrium the size of the policy maker’s valuation does not matter for the size of the policy bias. The idea is to construct a “reference game” and to shift the support of the equilibrium mixed strategies into the original game, without altering the structure of the densities.     

The Political Economy of IMF Conditionality: A Common Agency Model

The paper models the relationship between an aid‐providing international financial institution (IFI) and an aid‐receiving government whose economic policy choices are influenced by a domestic interest group. Two assistance schemes are evaluated: conditional aid in which the IFI makes assistance contingent on less‐ distorting economic policies and unconditional aid which is provided without such conditions. Conditional aid is shown to raise welfare of the receiving country and the world as a whole relative to unconditional aid. The paper also examines how conditional and unconditional aid schemes are influenced by the IFI's opportunity cost of providing assistance and the receiving government's political dependence on a domestic interest group.     

Efficient Private Production of Public Goods under Common Agency

A private, profit-maximizing firm produces a public good that enters the utility functions of several users. Each of them separately designs and proposes to the firm a contract specifying a transfer payment as a function of the amount of public good supplied. The firm has to accept or to refuse each contract before knowing the realized value of a random variable that enters its cost function. We study the Nash equilibria of this game and explore some refinements ruling out Pareto inefficient equilibria.Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Numbers: C72, H41.     

Common Agency and Partial Cooperation

A modified common agency model is used to investigate the impact of partial cooperation on agent incentives. In the case where principals move simultaneously, it is shown that partial cooperation is self-defeating from the organizing principals' perspective despite a strengthening of agent incentives and effort. In the second scenario, where the organizing principals have a first-mover advantage, it is demonstrated that not only are individual cooperating principals better off but the outcome in terms of agent incentives and effort is constrained Pareto efficient. This latter scenario illustrates the possibility that partial cooperation, when coupled with a strategic advantage, improves efficiency.     

The (International) Political Economy of Falling Wage Shares: Situating Working-Class Agency

This paper relates the financial and monetary dimensions of the contemporary economic crisis to working-class agency via a central concern of classical political economy: the distribution of surplus between the chief factors of production. The fall in the wage share of value added is now accepted as a stylised fact in the empirical economic literature. This paper argues that the punctuated pattern of the development validates the regulation theoretical narrative of an epochal shift from Fordism to finance-led accumulation. Furthermore, synthesising econometric studies supports a class-centred explanation. In the last instance, the falling wage share is due to successful transnational class rule in the form of a neoliberal hegemonic paradigm. Crucially, such class rule restructured the environment of trade unions, rendering increasingly ineffective its relational power resources. The paper concludes by considering the contradictory implications for organised labour of the current financial crisis. On the one hand, the financial crisis offers an opportunity to link its particular interests to the general interest of macroeconomic management since low wage share inhibits growth rates. But how might trade unions assert a higher wage share in the face of the structural power of (financial) capital?     

Sovereign Debt Capacity and the Distribution of Domestic Wealth: A Common Agency Model*

This paper proposes a stylized two‐period, two‐country model illustrating the role of distribution of domestic wealth in determining a country's level of access to international lending. We model sovereign debt redemption policy in a common agency framework. Within this framework, policy is the outcome of the interaction between government and local and foreign interest groups with conflicting preferences on debt repayment. Our main result is that in full lobby competition, when all interests are represented, the only equilibrium solution is repudiation and the consequent inability of government to access international capital markets. Conversely, when the ability to lobby depends on wealth, governments can access international credit up to a given maximum external debt capacity, determined by the skew in the distribution of domestic wealth.     

Contribution to a public good under subjective uncertainty

This paper examines how voluntary contributions to a public good are affected by the contributors' heterogeneity in beliefs about the uncertain impact of their contributions. It assumes that contributors have Savagian preferences that are represented by a two‐state‐dependent expected utility function and different beliefs about the benefit that will result from the sum of their contributions. We establish general comparative statics results regarding the effect of specific changes in the distribution of beliefs on the (unique) Nash equilibrium provision of the public good, under certain conditions imposed on the preferences. We specifically show that the equilibrium public good provision is increasing with respect to both first‐ and second‐order stochastic dominance changes in the distribution of beliefs. Hence, increasing the contributors' optimism about the uncertain benefit of their contributions increases aggregate public good provision, as does any homogenization of these beliefs around their mean.     

增值服务价值不可验证下的TPLSP关系契约激励机制

由第三方物流服务提供商(TPLSP)提供服务外包已成为制造业企业在快速变化环境下应对不确定性的一种战略选择。本文针对物流服务外包过程中一些增值服务项目的价值具有难以描述性和不可验证性的特点,设计了基于委托-代理理论的关系契约激励机制,分析了贴现因子对关系契约激励效果的影响。研究结论表明:关系契约能有效激励TPLSP努力工作,且当贴现因子足够大时,关系契约能激励TPLSP实施最优努力,实现服务产出的系统最优。     

产权、代理成本和代理效率

本文选择政府管制较少、竞争较为充分的电子电器行业作为研究对象,考察了产权制度与代理成本和代理效率的关系,得到以下结论:(1)在代理成本上,国有产权企业普遍高于混和产权企业,混和产权企业高于个人产权企业;在代理成本差异上,混和产权企业与个人产权企业的差异小于与国有产权企业的差异。(2)长期投资率和职工人数与代理成本呈显著正相关关系,而长期投资率、财务杠杆比率、职工人数等与代理效率呈显著负相关关系。(3)企业规模越大,不同产权的代理成本差异越小;反之代理成本差异越大。(4)随着市场竞争程度的提高,各类产权企业的代理成本都呈现下降趋势,其代理效率呈现提高趋势。我们研究的启示是国有企业改革的突破口应考虑如何降低其代理成本,解决的措施之一是产权改革,尤其是产权多元化的改革,其次是完善对投资和负债及冗员的监督和控制机制,以促进代理成本的降低和代理效率的提高。     

政治晋升激励机制下的地方重复建设——横向与纵向的比较分析

本文从政治晋升激励的角度考察了中国重复建设的内在机制。本文的分析表明,横向政治晋升激励的作用机制和纵向政治晋升激励的作用机制并不相同,由此得到落后地区是否进行重复建设的条件也就不相同。中国宏观经济环境中存在的价格扭曲放大了横向和纵向政治晋升激励的作用。为了降低落后地区进行重复建设的程度,中央政府需要对不同地区地方政府的官员采用不同的政治晋升激励,也需要努力推动自然资源和初级产品的价格体制改革。     

Conventions and Economic Change: A Contribution toward a Theory of Political Economy

This essay presents a perspective on the growth of knowledge as the source of economic growth. After a critical examination of the reasons why the crucial issue has been neglected in the dominant tradition in economics, a concept of paradigm-seeking as the essence of decision making under uncertainty and learning is proposed. Behavioral implications of paradigm-seeking include the generation of conventions by which people stabilize their expectations and build a network of coordination and cooperation. The stability of conventions, however, generates a dynamic process of change, by creating unexploited opportunities. Entrepreneurial successes and their emulation amount to the process of social learning and growth of knowledge. It is further suggested that implications of the proposed perspective are consistent with other observed phenomena.     

Common priors under incomplete information: a unification

Summary. While the meaningfulness of the common prior assumption (CPA) under incomplete information has been established recently by various authors, its epistemic rationale has not yet been adequately clarified. To do so, we provide a characterization of the CPA in terms of a new condition called “Mutual Calibration”, and argue that it constitutes a more transparent and more primitive formalization of the Harsanyi Doctrine than the existing characterizations. Our analysis unifies the understanding of the CPA under incomplete information and clarifies the role of higher-order expectations and of the difference between situations with only two and those with at least three agents. In the concluding section, the analysis is applied to the problem of defining Bayesian consistency of the intertemporal beliefs of a single-agent with imperfect memory. The CPA yields a notion of “Bayesian updating without a prior”. Received: March 24, 2000; revised version: April 27, 2000     

政府控制层级、CEO政治关联与代理成本:来自国有发电上市公司经验证据

笔者以国有发电公司为样本,采用Heckman两阶段回归方法,实证研究了CEO政治关联对代理成本的影响。结果显示,CEO政治关联会显著增大代理成本。其中,央企CEO政治关联会显著增大隐性代理成本,而地方国企CEO政治关联会显著增大显性和隐性代理成本,且其对代理成本的增幅明显大于央企,说明国企普遍存在的CEO政治关联加重了代理问题。     

委托代理视角下公立高等学校债务分析

随着高校规模的不断扩大,公立高等学校的巨额债务开始显性化。巨额的贷款负债已经成为高校沉重的负担,化解公立高等学校的巨额债务危机成为一个迫在眉睫的问题。从政府与公立高等学校的关系来看,政府是委托人,公立高等学校是代理人,代理问题的存在是公立高等学校形成巨额债务的一个原因。因此,健全政府与公立高等学校之间的委托代理关系是化解公立高等学校债务危机的关键。     

国外家族企业代理理论研究新进展

基于私有产权、两权合一和家族管理特征的考虑,传统代理理论把家族企业视为治理信任和降低代理成本的高效率制度安排。然而,越来越多的研究发现,当父母对子女的不对称的利他主义与私人所有权、所有者管理等特征相互交织时,家族企业凸现自我控制问题,这削弱了正式治理机制的效率。因此,家族企业同样面临逆向选择、道德风险和要挟等代理问题。嵌入在血缘和利他主义中的家族和企业两大系统的相互作用,使家族企业的代理问题更加复杂化,也给家族企业治理提出了难题。     

Political Economy of Agricultural Reform in Japan under Abe's Administration

As a symbol of regulations as “solid as bedrock,” Japanese agriculture is a key target for structural reform under the Abe administration's “Abenomics” growth strategy. Its reform proposals have encompassed long‐standing rice production regulations, agricultural organizations, including the agricultural cooperatives (JA), and the controlled system of milk distribution. The government also seeks to promote agricultural exports and farmers’ participation in processing and distributing agricultural products. Led by the Prime Minister's Office, and taking advantage of changes in the political environment of agriculture that have weakened the political power of farmers and JA, the government has launched a reform offensive with variable impact: progress has been made in some areas (e.g. JA reform) but little change in others (such as rice production adjustment). The most significant challenge lies ahead in reforming the farmland system, which is yet to be tackled.