The Riddle of German Self-Interest北大核心CSSCISSCI

How will the crises inside the euro-zone end?Many people have asked me this question in the US in recent weeks.How,in particular,might the eurozone move from crisis into stability     

The Role of Environmental Management in Consumers Preferences for Corporate Social Responsibility

Consumers in modern societies are increasingly sensitive to environmental performance by large and small corporations, making it a crucial issue in the overall policy of corporate social responsibility. The objective of this paper is to study the role of environmental performance in the profile of corporate social responsibility as perceived by consumers. We utilize a stated preference approach to the study of consumer’s preferences. This approach allows for the evaluation in monetary terms of the trade-offs that individuals can make between various aspects of corporate policy decisions, including the extent of environmental performance. The data is modelled by means of a mixture heuristics approach that allows us to study the utilization of various decision rules in the choice of products with various degrees of environmental performance. The results show that the linear compensatory heuristic is the most extended across individuals and these subjects value most the policies concerned with environmental management. Those subjects opting for the non-compensatory decision rule tend to focus on the attribute of good labour relations as the most salient factor defining corporate social responsibility. In addition, policy measures are relatively more valued for some products rather than for others, suggesting that consumers discriminate between products when valuing companies’ environmental profiles.     

Calculation of Self-Interest and Constitutional Consensus: The Role of Ideology

Constitutional political economy's veil of uncertainty prevents citizens from identifying their specific interests under political rules and facilitates agreement on rules by moving all individuals to an average position. But the calculation of self-interest in such settings is not straight-forward; citizens require a model of how the economy works to predict the effect of rules on welfare. Political ideologies typically supply such models. Citizens subscribing to different ideological models anticipate differential treatment under a given constitutional rule, breaking down the ability of the veil of uncertainty to achieve consensus. Constitutional consensus is unlikely in the absence of ideological consensus.     

专家服务市场的欺诈、信任与效率——基于社会偏好和空谈博弈的视角

本文从空谈博弈和专家的社会偏好角度来分析价格外生给定的专家服务市场的低效率现象。区别于已有文献,本文认为如果市场中的部分专家存在诚信行为,他们将与逐利专家形成高信号(如患者病情较重)区间混同、低信号(如患者病情较轻)区间分离的均衡,同时导致欺骗、服务失当以及信任缺失等一系列现象。逐利专家会以概率分布的方式模仿诚实专家的行为,向消费者随机发送均值高于其真实需求的信号。同时,低于某个阈值的信号会获得消费者完全的信任,而消费者对高于此阈值的信号的信任度会随着信号的上升而下降,所以逐利专家的信号策略本质上是在获取信任与绝对收益之间的权衡。在均衡中低需求消费者获得过多的服务(如小病大治),而高需求消费者获得的服务不足(如大病小治)。最后,本文发现引入无搜索成本的竞争可以解决以上市场效率低下的问题。     

澳大利亚卫生保健制度的私有化：公费医疗制度的终止

卫生保健政策是战后福利国家政策的重要组成,它代表的是一种不分社会等级面对全民的、超越市场机制、以收入补贴形式向民众提供医疗服务的方案。在澳大利亚,一直到公共健康保险机构以及继而公费医疗制度实施以后,全民卫生保健系统才得以确立。从此以后,公费医疗一直承受缩减资金的压力。自二十世纪七十年代中期开始,缩减政策一直是福利国家发展的主导政策。本文旨在追溯澳大利亚卫生保健系统的发展过程,揭示卫生保健系统的主要发展趋势,包括私有化过程,国民保健责任由集体承担转变为由私人承担的过程。这种发展趋势代表的是一种残余体制,它将威胁到以提供公平医疗保健待遇为宗旨的全民公费医疗制度的实施。     

社会排斥与劳动力市场分割——以性别歧视为例

劳动力市场因其社会性与制度性因素至少被分割成主要和次要两个层次,较之主要市场.次要市场的就业条件差、待遇低和发展机会少.女性劳动者因其社会性别角色的定位,往往被排斥在次要劳动力市场,就业困难且频遭歧视.社会性别排斥是劳动力市场分割的"借口",而分割的劳动力市场又强化了社会性别的排斥程度,如果没有相关的约束,这个恶性循环机制难以规避.正如商品和资本市场,在劳动力市场中,一方改进的代价是另一方的受损,无论如何效率和福利都没有实现最优,存在着改进的必要.本文深刻剖析社会排斥与中国劳动力市场分割的原因及危害,为政策和制度的建立提供理论研究的依据.     

Correcting Market Failure Due to Interdependent Preferences: When Is Piecemeal Policy Possible?

Allowing for general utility interdependence and agent heterogeneity, we characterize taxes that will generate first best solutions in markets. We show the equivalence of tax corrections derived from the Marshallian and compensated demand approaches. Next we analyze the conditions that are required for the market failure to be corrected by: (1) specific indirect ad valorem taxes on commodities, (2) the same proportional tax rate on every commodity, and (3) a proportional income tax rate on each individual. The conditions are related to the restrictions necessary to have H synthetic consumers without externalities who replicate behavior of individuals with externalities.     

Social Preferences in the Lab: A Comparison of Students and a Representative Population

We report from a lab experiment conducted with a sample of participants that is nationally representative for the adult population in Norway and two student samples (economics students and non‐economics students). The participants make choices both in a dictator game (a non‐strategic environment) and in a generalized trust game (a strategic environment). We find that the representative sample differs fundamentally from the student samples, both in the relative importance assigned to different moral motives (efficiency, equity, and reciprocity) and in the level of selfish behavior. It is also interesting to note that the gender effects observed in the student samples do not correspond to the gender effects observed in representative sample. Finally, whereas economics students behave less pro‐socially than non‐economics students, the two student groups are similar in the relative importance they assign to different moral motives.     

Firms' Market Power,Endogenous Preferences and the Focus of Competition Policy

Conventional neoclassical views of dominance are generally restricted to a concern for a firm's market power seen in terms of the ability to raise and maintain prices above their marginal costs of production. A prime example of this approach is the application of dominant firm price leadership models, which has led to a restricted theoretical perception of the nature of market power and to an incomplete view of the social costs of monopoly power. This paper argues that a broader conception of a firm's market power leads to a quite different perspective on its conduct. In particular, if we allow dominance to involve the ability to influence product demand patterns, then the theoretical analysis of firm behaviour changes significantly. Specifically, it implies the endogeneity of preferences which, it is argued, represents an important alternative to mainstream analysis. It is suggested that we need to consider a firm's dominance not so much in terms of its pricing in the context of a particular market structure but to focus on its ability to gain advantage over its rivals in terms of 'creating' an asymmetry in the demand for its products. This has important implications for competition policy, for it suggests a need to concentrate on the 'power' of firms and less on the effects of a change in market structure. Likewise, we need to reconsider the adequacy of defining markets in terms of product demand characteristics.     

The Social Structure of the Australian Urban Labour Market: 1976–1991

Abstract
The changing social structure of the labour market has both distributional and efficiency implications for Australian society. This article analyses the increase in the employment inequality among Australian urban neighbourhoods (that is, Collectors Districts or CDs) between the 1976 and 1991 censuses. When CDs are ranked by socioeconomic status we find that the employment rate falls by more in the low status areas than in other areas. Given that participation and population growth rates are higher in the high status areas, this phenomenon is likely to be driven by differences in employment levels. Shift share analysis of changes in employment levels shows that the lower demand for workers who live in the low status areas has led to falls in employment in those areas. Therefore the structural shift in the Australian economy has been a major explanation of the differences in employment rate within Australian cities. The results raise questions about the current ability of Australia's economy to adjust to the structural change necessary in an open economy .     

The Dynamic Evolution of Preferences

This paper develops a general methodology for characterizing the dynamic evolution of preferences in a wide class of strategic interactions. We give simple conditions characterizing the limiting distribution of preferences in general games, and apply our results to study the evolutionary emergence of overconfidence and interdependent preferences. We also show that this methodology can be adapted to cases where preferences are only imperfectly observed. Earlier drafts of this paper were circulated under the title: “The Evolution of Perception Biases” and some of these results appeared in the earlier working paper Heifetz, Shannon and Spiegel (2003). We thank three anonymous referees for their helpful comments. Shannon thanks the NSF for research support under grant SES-0351346.     

When Cultures Collide: Social Security and the Market

In his 1999 State of the Union address, President Clinton raised the possibility of investing social security funds in the equities market. In this article, two anthropologists who have studied the culture of the financial world assess the President's proposal. The analysis focuses on the vast cultural gap between the private-sector participants in the equities market and the federal bureaucrats who would inevitably manage social security investments. The authors examine similar arrangements at the state level, the cultural differences among the entities involved, and how those differences interfere with fiduciary decision-making. They conclude that the gap is simply too wide for the proposal to be workable, and as a result, the adverse consequences likely outweigh the potential benefits. Although some consequences are foreseeable, more threatening consequences can be envisioned only in the most general terms.