Strategyproof sharing of submodular costs:budget balance versus efficiency

Summary. A service is produced for a set of agents. The service is binary, each agent either receives service or not, and the total cost of service is a submodular function of the set receiving service. We investigate strategyproof mechanisms that elicit individual willingness to pay, decide who is served, and then share the cost among them. If such a mechanism is budget balanced (covers cost exactly), it cannot be efficient (serve the surplus maximizing set of users) and vice-versa. We characterize the rich family of budget balanced and group strategyproof mechanisms and find that the mechanism associated with the Shapley value cost sharing formula is characterized by the property that its worst welfare loss is minimal. When we require efficiency rather than budget balance – the more common route in the literature – we find that there is a single Clarke-Groves mechanism that satisfies certain reasonable conditions: we call this the marginal cost pricing mechanism. We compare the size of the marginal cost pricing mechanism's worst budget surplus with the worst welfare loss of the Shapley value mechanism. Received: October 26, 1998; revised version: December 3, 1999     

Strategyproof Cost Sharing of Multiple Excludable Public Goods

In a model of cost sharing of multiple excludable public goods, we examine the properties of mechanisms satisfying strategyproofness, no subsidy, outcome non‐bossiness, budget balance, individual rationality and consumer sovereignty. We show that such mechanisms in general will not satisfy the equity property of equal treatment of equals. This contrasts with the single excludable public good case.     

股权结构与董事会治理效率交互效应探究

以2006-2011年983家上市公司为样本,运用面板数据的个体固定效应模型,不仅对股权结构、董事会治理效率与公司绩效间的关系进行了研究,还检验了股权结构与董事会治理效率间是否存在交互效应。通过研究发现,股权集中度和股权制衡度都与公司绩效呈倒U型关系,董事会治理效率与公司绩效正相关,股权结构与董事会治理效率间存在交互效应。具体来说,股权集中度与董事会治理效率的交互效应与公司绩效负相关,股权制衡度与董事会治理效率的交互效应与公司绩效正相关。     

Characterizing Natural Implementability: The Fair and Walrasian Correspondences

We characterize natural implementability in exchange economies when a social choice correspondence possibly recommends a Pareto efficient allocation where the common marginal rate of substitution is not determined uniquely. We find that the no-envy and efficient (or fair) correspondence cannot be implemented by any natural mechanism with a price and a quantity announcement, but can be implemented by a natural mechanism with a price and two-quantity announcement. On the other hand, the constrained Walrasian correspondence can be implemented by a natural price-quantity mechanism with budget balance. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: C72, D51, D63, D78.     

略论票据时效

票据时效既是公平与效率均衡理论的极好诠释,又体现了效率优先的主张.与民法上的时效相比,票据时效具有短期性和独立性的特征.它既不同于消灭时效又不同于除斥期间,而是一种独特的时效制度.最后,作者结合票据实践中的票据时效期间的起算点问题以及票据期间中断是否需要提示票据等问题提出了自己的看法.     

Worst-case optimal redistribution of VCG payments in multi-unit auctions

For allocation problems with one or more items, the well-known Vickrey–Clarke–Groves (VCG) mechanism (aka Clarke mechanism, Generalized Vickrey Auction) is efficient, strategy-proof, individually rational, and does not incur a deficit. However, it is not (strongly) budget balanced: generally, the agents' payments will sum to more than 0. We study mechanisms that redistribute some of the VCG payments back to the agents, while maintaining the desirable properties of the VCG mechanism. Our objective is to come as close to budget balance as possible in the worst case. For auctions with multiple indistinguishable units in which marginal values are nonincreasing, we derive a mechanism that is optimal in this sense. We also derive an optimal mechanism for the case where we drop the non-deficit requirement. Finally, we show that if marginal values are not required to be nonincreasing, then the original VCG mechanism is worst-case optimal.     

Egalitarian equivalence and strategyproofness in the queueing problem

We investigate the implications of egalitarian equivalence (Pazner and Schmeidler in Q J Econ 92:671–687, 1978) together with queue efficiency and strategyproofness in the context of queueing problems. We completely characterize the class of mechanisms satisfying the three requirements. Though there is no mechanism in this class satisfying budget balance, feasible mechanisms exist and we characterize the set of all such mechanisms. We also show that it is impossible to find a mechanism satisfying queue efficiency, egalitarian equivalence, and a stronger notion of strategyproofness called weak group strategyproofness. In addition, we show that generically there is no mechanism satisfying both egalitarian equivalence and no-envy.     

初次分配中效率与公平关系探讨

初次分配中效率与公平不是孰轻孰重的关系,初次分配中的效率本身具有公平性质。针对初次分配中存在的不公现象,处理好效率与公平的关系具有紧迫性和现实性。要对影响初次分配中效率与公平关系的因素进行分析,区分产生收入差距的合理因素和不合理因素,通过完善社会主义市场经济体制、真正落实社会主义初级阶段的分配制度、制定并严格执行国家在微观经济领域制定的法律法规等措施,正确处理初次分配中效率与公平关系。     

Bond financed fiscal policy and the problem of instrument instability

Previous analyses of bond financed government expenditure policies have indicated stability problems but have considered only a once-for-all and sustained increase in government spending. In this paper we examine the bond financing of temporary government expenditure changes, which form part of an ongoing policy designed to “balance the budget over the business cycle.” We find that an endogenous fiscal policy can keep national output near its target value but that the effects on the national debt and the size of the public sector are likely not to be transitory. There is a strong tendency toward instrument instability, in that control of the economy forces the level of government spending to forever diverge from its equilibrium value.     

Extraction rights allocation with liquidity constraints

We study the optimal allocation of a resource in a second-best world in which parties may be liquidity-constrained due to credit frictions and capital market imperfections. In this setting, common to various natural resource industries, agents are unable to bid more than their budget regardless of their valuation. While auction markets are widely used mechanisms for allocating natural resource extraction rights and conservation contracts, we show that in these circumstances the competitive market –which allocates items based on rank order of bids– fails to achieve the first-best allocation. The market outcome is welfare-dominated by a hybrid mechanism consisting of random assignment followed by resale in a secondary market. Via the initial lottery, the hybrid-mechanism allocates the items with positive probability to high-valuation low-wealth individuals who would not have been able to afford them in a competitive market. High-valuation high-wealth agents, on the other hand, acquire the items in the secondary market if they do not receive them in the initial lottery. Therefore, equity in the allocation of access to the resource may be justified not only by distributional concerns but also by economic efficiency. We illustrate our model using data from buybacks of harvesting rights in the seafood industry.     

CONDITIONING AID ON SOCIAL EXPENDITURES

Aid conditionality forces countries to adopt policies that they would not otherwise choose. We examine how government discretion should be so constrained when the donor cannot fully control public expenditures, but instead can influence a less disaggregated indicator of public policy, namely the allocation of public spending between the social sectors (e.g. education, health, etc.) on the one hand and more traditional public goods (e.g. infrastructure) on the other. We first show how budget allocations will be altered when recipient government preferences are known – i.e. we characterize what policies the donor should "buy"– and how a given aid budget should be allocated between different types of countries. When recipient government preferences are not known by the donor, the permitted policies are distorted due to incentive constraints, and the extent to which aid flows are optimally differentiated between different countries is reduced.     

Agreeing on Efficient Emissions Reduction

We propose a simple contest‐based mechanism providing incentives to reduce harmful emissions to their efficient level without infringing upon productive efficiency. Participation in the most stylized form of the scheme is voluntary and individually rational; all rules are mutually agreeable and are unanimously adopted if proposed. The scheme balances its budget and requires no principal. In a perhaps more realistic stochastic output version, which could potentially inform policy decisions, we show that the transfers required by the efficient mechanism create a mutual insurance motive that can serve as an effective rationale for the (gradual) formation of international environmental agreements.     

Official fiscal forecasts in EU member states under the European Semester and Fiscal Compact – An empirical assessment

The efficacy of official forecasts in the EU has been under the spotlight since the introduction of the euro, with biases widely reported prior to the 2008–12 financial and sovereign bond market crisis. Changes to the EU fiscal rules and procedures, in the form of the European Semester and Fiscal Compact, in the early 2010s were adopted to improve forecasting, including through providing a role for independent fiscal institutions. Using data for 22 countries between 2013 and 2019, this paper shows that, despite these changes, biases, of a pessimistic form, remain in forecasts of budget balance and output variables in Stability and Convergence Programmes and the European Commission's Spring Forecasts. Econometric analysis indicates forecast errors in both the headline budget balance and the structural budget balance being explained by forecast errors in output variables and by EU fiscal rule requirements. Member states under an excessive deficit procedure provide optimistic headline budget balance forecasts compared to non-EDP countries, while those that have not met their medium-term objective report smaller forecast errors for the structural budget balance. Independent fiscal institutions are linked to a smaller bias to forecasts of the structural budget balance but have no effect on the forecast errors of the headline budget balance.     

The communication requirements of social choice rules and supporting budget sets

The paper examines the communication requirements of social choice rules when the (sincere) agents privately know their preferences. It shows that for a large class of choice rules, any minimally informative way to verify that a given alternative is in the choice rule is by verifying a “budget equilibrium”, i.e., that the alternative is optimal to each agent within a “budget set” given to him. Therefore, any communication mechanism realizing the choice rule must find a supporting budget equilibrium. We characterize the class of choice rules that have this property. Furthermore, for any rule from the class, we characterize the minimally informative messages (budget equilibria) verifying it. This characterization is used to identify the amount of communication needed to realize a choice rule, measured with the number of transmitted bits or real variables. Applications include efficiency in convex economies, exact or approximate surplus maximization in combinatorial auctions, the core in indivisible-good economies, and stable many-to-one matchings.     

House Allocation with Transfers

We consider the Shapley–Scarf house allocation problem where monetary transfers are allowed. We characterize the class of mechanisms that are strategy-proof, ex post individually rational, ex post budget-balanced, and “collusion-proof.” In these mechanisms, the price of each object is fixed in advance, and the objects are reallocated according to the (unique) core assignment of the Shapley–Scarf economy associated with the prices. The special case in which all prices are zero is the core mechanism studied by Shapley and Scarf. Our mechanisms are compelling alternatives to the Groves mechanisms, which satisfy neither budget balance nor our condition of collusion-proofness. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: C71, C78, D71, D78, D89.     

Socialism and incentives: Developing a framework

This paper proposes a framework for comparative analysis of economic systems that is broad enough to encompass not only variants of socialism, but also laissez-faire and other cases. The two basic components of the framework deal with information and incentives. A central problem is that of designing an incentive-compatible, informationally decentralized mechanism satisfying the requirements of optimality and fairness. Recent results show that there are limitations on the design of such mechanisms; in particular, it may be impossible to avoid lowering the level of satisfaction of some members of society in order to achieve equity and efficiency. J. Comp. Econ., Sept. 1979, 3(3), pp. 207–216. University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455.     

Pension reserve fund,political budget cycles and fiscal illusion

We model political manipulations of pension reserve funds in a modified Shi and Svensson (2006) political budget cycle (PBC) model. Assuming that a share of voters suffers from fiscal illusion the incumbent can increase her re-election chances by prematurely spending parts of the reserve fund. We also obtain results that are counterintuitive, but only at first sight. First, it can be shown that the incumbent wants to reduce the manipulation when her ego rent increases. Second, the optimal magnitude of manipulation does not necessarily go up when the share of voters suffering from fiscal illusion rises.     

The micro economics of group behavior: General characterization

We study the demand function of a group of S members facing a global budget constraint. Any vector belonging to the budget set can be consumed within the group, with no restriction on the form of individual preferences, the nature of individual consumptions or the form of the decision process beyond efficiency. Moreover, only the group aggregate behavior, summarized by its demand function, is observable. We provide necessary and (locally) sufficient restrictions that fully characterize the group's demand function, with and without distribution factors. We show that the private or public nature of consumption within the group is not testable from aggregate data on group behavior.     

股权结构与股权代理成本关系的实证研究——基于2011年创业板上市公司的数据研究

公司治理的基础是股权结构,核心问题就是如何降低代理成本,但是由于特殊的历史原因,我国股权分置制度存在的弊端严重影响着公司治理。根据代理理论,股权代理成本可以划分为管理层与股东之间利益冲突引起的第一类代理成本和控股股东与中小股东之间利益冲突引起的第二类代理成本。所以本文就基于股权分置改革后的视角,以2011年创业板上市公司为样本,采用理论与实证相结合的分析方法来分析股权结构与股权代理成本之间的关系,得出股权集中度可以降低第一类代理成本和第二类代理成本;股权制衡度在一定程度上可以降低第二类代理成本,但会提高第一类代理成本;负债也会有助于降低第一类代理成本;而管理层和机构投资者持股并未起到降低代理成本的作用。     

制度环境、股权制衡对企业创新绩效的影响机理——基于有调节的中介效应

在对制度环境、股权制衡与企业创新之间的相关性进行理论分析的基础上,利用359家深市上市企业在2008—2010年的数据,实证检验了制度环境、股权制衡对企业创新绩效的影响机理。实证结果表明:制度环境对企业创新绩效具有显著的正向影响,内部驱动力在该影响过程中发挥中介作用;股权制衡正向调节内部驱动力与企业创新绩效之间的关系;高股权制衡度能促进企业增加R&D投入,从而提高企业的创新绩效;低股权制衡度对企业R&D投入增加、创新绩效提升的影响不明显。最后针对营造良好的制度环境、建立有效的股权制衡结构等给出对策建议。