Role of honesty in full implementation

This paper introduces a new concept of full implementation that takes into account agents’ preferences for understanding how the process concerning honest reporting works. We assume that the agents have intrinsic preferences for honesty in the sense that they dislike the idea of lying when it does not influence their welfare but instead goes against the intention of the central planner. We show that the presence of such preferences functions in eliminating unwanted equilibria from the practical perspective, even if the degree of the preference for honesty is small. The mechanisms designed are detail free and involve only small fines.     

Old‐age Social Security versus Forward Intergenerational Public Goods Provision

This paper introduces an overlapping‐generations model with earnings heterogeneity and borrowing constraints. The labour income tax and the allocation of tax revenue between social security and forward intergenerational public goods are determined in a bidimensional majoritarian voting game played by successive generations. The political equilibrium is characterized by an ends‐against‐the‐middle equilibrium where low‐income and high‐income individuals form a coalition in favour of a lower tax rate and less social security while middle‐income individuals favour a higher tax rate and greater social security. Government spending then shifts from social security to public goods provision if higher wage inequality is associated with a borrowing constraint and a high elasticity of marginal utility of youth consumption.     

α‐SERIAL MECHANISMS FOR THE PROVISION OF AN EXCLUDABLE PUBLIC GOOD

We present a new class of “α‐serial mechanisms” for the provision of an excludable public good. Those mechanisms have a similar structure to the serial mechanism, but may let the non‐consumers pay a positive cost. They inherit desirable properties such as anonymity, envy‐freeness, Maskin monotonicity, and population monotonicity from the serial mechanism. We calculate the “maximal efficiency loss” and “maximal manipulation” of α‐serial mechanisms and point out a trade‐off between these two properties.     

On the determinants of local government performance: A two-stage nonparametric approach

This article analyzes the efficiency of local governments in the Comunitat Valenciana (Spain) and their main explanatory variables. The analysis is performed in two stages. Firstly, efficiency is measured via (nonparametric) activity analysis techniques. Specifically, we consider both Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Free Disposable Hull (FDH) techniques. The second stage identifies some critical determinants of efficiency, focusing on both political and fiscal policy variables. In contrast to previous two-stage research studies, our approach performs the latter attempt via nonparametric smoothing techniques, rather than econometric methods such as OLS or Tobit related techniques. Results show that efficiency scores, especially under the nonconvexity assumption (FDH), are higher for large municipalities. Thus, there is empirical evidence to suggest that resources may be better allocated by large municipalities. However, the inefficiency found is not entirely attributable to poor management, as second-stage analysis reveals both fiscal and political variables to be explicably related to municipality performance. Moreover, the explanatory variables’ impact on efficiency is robust to the chosen technique—either convex DEA or nonconvex FDH.     

Terrorist backlash, terrorism mitigation, and policy delegation

This paper presents a three-stage proactive game involving terrorists, elected policymakers, and voters. In each of two targeted countries, a representative voter chooses an elected policymaker, charged with deciding proactive countermeasures to ameliorate a transnational terrorist threat. Two primary considerations drive the voters' strategic choice: free riding on the other countries' countermeasures and limiting a reprisal terrorist attack. The resulting low proactive countermeasures benefit the terrorists, whose attacks successfully exploit voters' strategic actions. This finding stems from a delegation problem where leadership by voters has a detrimental consequence on the well-being of targeted countries. Domestic politics add another layer of concern when addressing a common terrorist threat.     

Rent-seeking distortions and fiscal procyclicality

Recent research has demonstrated that while government expenditures are countercyclical in most industrialized countries, they tend to be procyclical in developing countries. We develop a dynamic political-economy model to explain this phenomenon. In the model, public expenditures provide insurance to uninsured households, and optimal fiscal policy is countercyclical. The introduction of a political friction, in which successive governments disagree on the desired distribution of public spending, can lead to procyclical fiscal policies. Numerical simulations of the model allow us to compare quantitatively the relative role of common explanations for fiscal procyclicality. We conclude that political distortions in the fiscal process can explain fiscal procyclicality better than other common explanations, such as borrowing constraints and macroeconomic volatility.     

Property taxation as incentive for cost control: Empirical evidence for utility services in Norway

Recent theoretical research suggests that property taxation has incentive effects that can help control cost problems in the public sector. The institutional setting in Norway allows this first empirical investigation of the incentive effect of property taxation, since we can separate between local governments with and without property tax. The raw data of the variation in the unit cost level for utilities show that local governments with property tax have 20% lower unit cost. Using both linear regression and propensity score matching, we are not able to wash out the difference in unit costs. Our interpretation is that having a visible and controversial local tax related to property stimulates voter interest in local government activities and thereby may help cost control.     

Strategy-proof and individually rational social choice functions for public good economies

Summary This note is to inform about a mistake in my paper (Serizawa, 1996). In that paper, I characterized strategy-proof, individually rational, budget-balancing, non-exploitative and non-bossy social choice functions for economies with one public good and one private good. I established as Theorem 3 (page 507) that a social choice function is strategy-proof, individually rational with respect to endowment, budget-balancing, non-exploitative and non-bossy if and only if it is a scheme of semi-convex cost sharing determined by the minimum demand principle. I also exposed one example (Example 2, page 507) in order to emphasize that non-bossiness is indispensable for this characterization. I claimed that the social choice function in that example satisfies the above axioms except for non-bossiness, and is not a scheme of semi-convex cost sharing. However, the social choice function in the example is actually not strategy-proof, as shown in the simple discussion below. Therefore it is an open question whether or not a similar characterization theorem holds without non-bossiness.I thank Professor Rajat Deb, who kindly pointed out my mistake.     

Voluntary formation of communities for the provision of public projects

In this paper we examine a group formation problem, where heterogeneous individuals partitioned themselves into communities, each choosing its own public project from the given space of feasible projects. The model is that of “horizontal product differentiation” where individuals display distinct preferences over the policy space. We consider the notion of “efficient” configuration that minimizes the total project-related costs and aggregate personalized costs of all individuals, and “sustainable” configurations, those are immune against breakaways by subgroups of individuals. Our main result is that, with a unidimensional project space and single-peaked personalized costs, every efficient partition is sustainable.     

Favoritism and reverse discrimination

We analyze the inefficiency that may arise in the form of reverse discrimination in the presence of favoritism or nepotism. Favoritism is typically associated with inefficient transfers to the core support of the incumbent government. But inefficiency that is opposite in nature may also arise through the electoral process in a political environment where favoritism is pervasive. We show that if the policy maker is sufficiently office seeking, a socially efficient action may never be taken if it yields benefits to his core support due to reputational concerns. Hence, the core support of the incumbent may fare worse than other groups. We also consider the implications of policies such as anti-nepotism laws or term limits in the presence of favoritism.     

The structure of strategy-proof social choice — Part I: General characterization and possibility results on median spaces

We define a general notion of single-peaked preferences based on abstract betweenness relations. Special cases are the classical example of single-peaked preferences on a line, the separable preferences on the hypercube, the “multi-dimensionally single-peaked” preferences on the product of lines, but also the unrestricted preference domain. Generalizing and unifying the existing literature, we show that a social choice function is strategy-proof on a sufficiently rich domain of generalized single-peaked preferences if and only if it takes the form of voting by issues (“voting by committees”) satisfying a simple condition called the “Intersection Property.”Based on the Intersection Property, we show that the class of preference domains associated with “median spaces” gives rise to the strongest possibility results; in particular, we show that the existence of strategy-proof social choice rules that are non-dictatorial and neutral requires an underlying median space. A space is a median space if, for every triple of elements, there is a fourth element that is between each pair of the triple; numerous examples are given (some well-known, some novel), and the structure of median spaces and the associated preference domains is analysed.     

Manipulating uncertainty

Uncertainty about the distributional incidence of policy reforms may, if it impinges selectively on particular subsets of voters, alter the direction of the majority vote. This possibility should be a matter of special concern when subject to potential manipulation by a purposeful agent such as a Leviathan-like bureaucracy. This paper discusses a constitutional defense against such prospect. This paper was prepared for a conference on “Constitutional Status Quo and Prospects for Change” held at George Mason University in April, 1994. I am grateful to participants in that conference and to my colleagues at Nova, especially to Mário Páscoa, for their comments and criticisms. I also benefited from comments of an anonymous referee. Responsibility for errors remains with me.     

STRATEGIC CANDIDACY AND SINGLE‐PEAKEDNESS*

In elections, the voting outcomes are affected by strategic entries of candidates. We study a class of voting rules immune to strategic candidacy. Dutta et al. (2001 ) show that such rules satisfying unanimity are dictatorial if all orderings of candidates are admissible for voters’ preferences. When voters’ preferences are single‐peaked over a political spectrum, there exist non‐dictatorial rules immune to strategic candidacy. An example is the rule selecting the m‐th peak from the left among the peaks of voters’ preferences, where m is any natural number no more than the number of voters. We show that immunity from strategic candidacy with basic axioms fully characterizes the family of the m‐th leftmost peak rules.     

Political regimes and foreign intervention

We present a theory of endogenous political regimes that emphasizes foreign direct investment as a motive for foreign governments to either induce regime transitions or promote regime consolidations. We characterize different forms of foreign intervention and identify the conditions under which they occur. We highlight new channels through which economic factors affect political regime choices. Foreign intervention is most likely to originate from countries where the government has a substantial pro-investor bias and to be directed at destinations where FDI is highly profitable and where income inequality is high. Foreign-sponsored coups d'état are more likely to be directed at democratic governments of poor countries. In destinations where FDI is highly profitable but the domestic elite is weak, foreign intervention tends to be aimed at stabilizing dictatorships. We relate the analysis to evidence on foreign intervention from around the world.     

Abstract Arrowian aggregation

In a general framework of abstract binary aggregation, we characterize aggregation problems in terms of the monotone Arrowian aggregators they admit. Specifically, we characterize the problems that admit non-dictatorial, locally non-dictatorial, anonymous, and neutral monotone Arrowian aggregation, respectively. As a consequence of these characterizations, we also obtain new results on the possibility of strategy-proof social choice and the “concrete Arrowian” aggregation of preferences into a social ordering on generalized single-peaked domains.     

Priorities in the location of multiple public facilities

A collective decision problem is described by a set of agents, a profile of single-peaked preferences over the real line and a number of public facilities to be located. We consider public facilities that do not suffer from congestion and are non-excludable. We characterize the class of rules satisfying Pareto-efficiency, object-population monotonicity and sovereignty. Each rule in the class is a priority rule that selects locations according to a predetermined priority ordering among “interest groups”. We characterize the subclasses of priority rules that respectively satisfy anonymity, avoid the no-show paradox, strategy-proofness and population-monotonicity. In particular, we prove that a priority rule is strategy-proof if and only if it partitions the set of agents into a fixed hierarchy. Any such rule can also be viewed as a collection of generalized peak-selection median rules, that are linked across populations, in a way that we describe.