Mechanism Design with Interdependent Valuations: Surplus Extraction

If valuations are interdependent and agents observe their own allocation payoffs, then two-stage revelation mechanisms expand the set of implementable decision functions. In a two-stage revelation mechanism agents report twice. In the first stage - before the allocation is decided - they report their private signals. In the second stage - after the allocation has been made, but before final transfers are decided - they report their payoffs from the allocation. Conditions are provided under which an uninformed seller can extract (or virtually extract) the full surplus from a sale to privately informed buyers, in spite of the buyers’ signals being independent random variables. This research was started when I was visiting the Department of Applied Mathematics of the University of Venice, and continued while visiting the European University Institute in Florence. Their financial support is gratefully acknowledged.     

What’s the aim for competition policy: optimizing market structure or encouraging innovative behaviors?

Innovation is usually thought of as a change in the fundamentals of an economy, which can require adjustments by policy-makers. The latter are usually thought as in regard to a dominant vision, which is to restore an optimal market structure, and leads to a competition policy mainly aimed at controlling for antitrust practices and limiting market power. In this paper, we favor another vision of innovation, as a discovery process that cannot allow ex ante a definition of best practices. Dealing with information issues in two different and alternative perspectives, we argue that antitrust authorities confront a market imperfection–market failure dilemma (MI–MF dilemma) which leads them to favor the existence of appreciative and discretionary policy rather than encouraging the existence of any market structure thought of as optimal as regards the current state of information. We conclude with policy implications, contrasting the EU with the US. This paper was presented at the 10th International J.A. Schumpeter Society Conference on Innovation, Industrial Dynamics and Structural Transformation: Schumpeterian Legacies, Milan 2004. It owes very much to the collaboration of J-L Gaffard with M. Amendola in the recent years. However he is not responsible for the way we have taken advantage of it.     

转型经济中的可信承诺问题研究

可信承诺问题是转型经济体的一个重要问题。使承诺可信的途径有外生和内生两种。内生途径大体相当于博弈论中所强调的“声誉机制”,而外生途径则蕴含在一系列的制度安排之中,包括信息、权力和资源的分散化以及充分的竞争等。本文将以转型经济中两类重要的可信承诺问题———软预算约束问题和棘轮效应问题———的有关模型研究来说明我们的观点。     

Coordinated voting in sequential and simultaneous elections: some experimental evidence

This paper studies a situation wherein a set of voters choose between two alternatives in the presence of a payoff externality. Specifically, regardless of her intrinsic preference, a voter’s payoff is maximized should she vote for the alternative that garners a majority of the votes cast. Are votes coordinated on a single alternative? Using laboratory experiments, we examine voting patterns in sequential voting and simultaneous voting elections. Across both election types, we also vary the amount of information that an individual voter has regarding the intrinsic preferences of the other voters. Our main findings are as follows. In the “low” information treatment, sequential voting elections facilitate coordinated voting. However, in the “high” information treatment, voting patterns are not dependent on how the election is structured.     

速度竞争力:企业竞争优势分析的新视角

在信息经济时代，速度优势是企业竞争优势的重要来源，速度成为竞争中占据领先地位的关键。企业必须全面构建快速反应系统，不断提高自身对市场和技术的快速反应能力一即速度竞争力。企业快速反应系统必须以顾客需求为中心，力求在最短的时间内以最低的成本提供最大的顾客让渡价值。速度竞争优势的构建必然要求企业组织结构的再造，使之呈现网络化、扁平化、模块化发展趋势。     

Herd behaviour as an incentive scheme

Summary. We consider a set-up in which firms sequentially adopt a technology. The technology is a public good. Late movers, upon observing the early movers adopting the old technology, (partly) infer that the new technology does not exist. This hampers their incentives to innovate. Early movers anticipate this and rather exert effort to try to invent the new technology. Hence, in our model herding reduces free-rider problems and may - in the presence of switching costs - even increase efficiency.Received: 20 June 2002, Revised: 26 May 2004, JEL Classification Numbers: D83, D82, D62.I am very grateful to my thesis advisor Mathias Dewatripont for his many helpful suggestions. I thank seminar participants at ECARES, DELTA, IAE, GREMAQ and WZB. I also benefited from comments made by A.Banerjee, P.Bolton, M.Castanheira, J.Gyntelberg, P.Legros, G.Roland, M.Ruckes, X.Vives, J.Zwiebel and an anonymous referee. I gratefully acknowledge financial assistance provided by the European Commission through its TMR program (Contract number FMRX-CT98-0203) and from the Inter University Poles of Attraction Program (Contract PAI P4/28). Finally, I am also very grateful to M.Castanheira for his many encouragements at the start of my research work.     

基于专利信息的中美区块链技术竞争态势分析

当前区块链技术仍处于快速发展期,对中美整体竞争格局影响至关重要。专利是关键技术的代表、产业发展的基石,从专利信息出发,可以把握技术竞争态势,进而管窥中美区块链产业发展差异,为我国区块链产业发展提供政策建议。基于德温特专利数据,采取专利分析法和社会网络分析法对其进行深度挖掘,结合“新钻石模型,研究发现,在政府、机会、需求条件、知识吸收层面上,中国区块链技术及产业具有优势地位;而在生产要素、产业支持、企业战略结构与创新能力方面,美国优势更为明显。从政府、行业、企业层面分别提出建议：①政府层面,继续保持在政府管理与公共服务领域的优势;②行业层面,注重提高区块链专利质量;③企业层面,提高国际合作能力,加强区块链服务于实体经济。     

The importance of being informed: Experimental evidence on demand for environmental quality

To what extent does information affect the demand for environmental quality? A randomly selected group of households in an Indian city were informed whether or not their drinking water had tested positive for fecal contamination using a simple, inexpensive test kit. Households initially not purifying their water and told that their drinking water was possibly contaminated, were 11 percentage points more likely to begin some form of home purification in the next eight weeks than households that received no information. They spent $7.24 (at PPP) more on purification than control households. By way of comparison, an additional year of schooling of the most educated male in the household is associated with a 3 percentage-point rise in the probability of initial purification, while a standard-deviation increase in the wealth index is associated with a 12 percentage-point rise in this probability and an $11.75 rise in expenditure. Initially purifying households that received a “no contamination” result did not react by reducing purification. These results suggest that estimates of the demand for environment quality that assume full information may significantly under-estimate it.     

Entrepreneurial competition and its impact on the aggregate economy

This paper models entrepreneurship as the entrepreneur’s information processing activity in order to predict changes in demand and reallocate resources. The results show that allocative efficiency—and therefore aggregate productivity—increases through intensified competition by entrepreneurs grasping at opportunities. This fierce competition leads to price reductions that result in the improvement of measured aggregate productivity. The price reduction also forces relatively less able entrepreneurs to become workers. As resources are then dealt with only by relatively talented entrepreneurs, this selection effect also increases aggregate productivity. The paper also discusses how the selection effect influences the distribution of firm size.