An Experimental Study on Dividing Gains through Politics

This article offers experimental evidence to examine an important case in politics where a monopolistic proposer seeks a majority's consent from competitive responders to split the gain. The unique subgame perfect equilibrium prediction is that the side of trade with a monopoly will exploit the side of trade with competition to reap almost all of the gain. Our experimental evidence reveals that while responders do compete with each other to race to the bottom (consistent with the prediction), the monopolistic proposer settles down to offer a ‘fair’ share of the pie to those from whom he or she seeks majority support (contrary to the prediction).     

A model of and some evidence on the interrelatedness of decisions underlying the demand for capital services

The objective in this paper is to investigate systematically the existence and nature of interactions among the decisions for gross investment, capital scrappage, and maintenance expenditures. For this purpose, a three-equation model is proposed and implemented econometrically, using data from the locomotives and freight cars of the Class-I railways in the United States during the period 1944–1970. The results obtained suggest that, for the assets studied, the aforementioned decisions exhibit substantial interactions that arc in accord with most a priori considerations. The structural estimates of the model, for example, show that, among other things: (a) gross investment is related positively to scrappage and maintenance expenditures of both locomotives and freight cars are associated inversely, and (c) maintenance expenditures are also significantly influenced by either current or lagged gross investment.     

New directions for the teaching computer: Citizen participation in community planning

In 1970 an experiment was conducted to demonstrate the feasibility of using the teaching computer as a medium for involving people in community planning. A program on an environmental issue was presented on the PLATO system to a nonrandom sample of the population of Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. The participants included government leaders, civic leaders, and interested citizens. The data from this experiment suggests the following:

1. 1. People from the community were willing to come to work through the program.

2. 2. Participants found the medium useful for presenting concise and relevant information.

3. 3. Presentation of information in this way may be particularly useful for those who have not yet formed an opinion on the issue.

4. 4. Participants found particular advantage in being able to make comments and respond to questions.

5. 5. Participants indicated that they would like to see more issues presented in this way.

Useful suggestions were also made for including more information on costs, sources of information, political considerations, and views of the various interest groups. The criticisms dealt primarily with the inconvenient location of the terminals and the presence of some bias in the program.     

Assessing the impact of economic liberalization across countries: a comparison of dairy industry efficiency in Canada and the USA

This paper examines and compares the technical efficiency measures of Ontario and New York dairy producers for the period 1992 to 1998. A nonparametric stochastic frontier model is introduced to estimate technical efficiency. The backfitting algorithm of Breiman and Friedman is used to estimate the frontier. Empirical results indicate that during the period of study, New York dairy farmers produced milk more efficiently than Ontario dairy producers, but the magnitude of the difference was small. The estimated mean technical efficiency for the former group is 0.602 as compared to 0.532 for the latter. The results also indicated that over time, dairy farms in both regions improved their level of technical efficiency. Furthermore, no correlation was found between farm size and estimated technical efficiency.