Foundations of Dominant-Strategy Mechanisms

Robert Wilson criticizes applied game theory's reliance on common-knowledge assumptions. In reaction to Wilson's critique, the recent literature of mechanism design has adopted the goal of finding detail-free mechanisms in order to eliminate this reliance. In practice this has meant restricting attention to simple mechanisms such as dominant-strategy mechanisms. However, there has been little theoretical foundation for this approach. In particular it is not clear the search for an optimal mechanism that does not rely on common-knowledge assumption would lead to simpler mechanisms rather than more complicated ones. This paper tries to fill the void. In the context of an expected revenue maximizing auctioneer, we investigate some foundations for using simple, dominant-strategy auctions.     

The First U.S. Food Stamp Program: An Example of Rent Seeking and Avoiding

Abstract . Rent seeking involves the wasteful expenses incurred to secure, acquire, or maintain a monopoly position. Rent avoiding involves the expenditures undertaken to avoid the imposition of rent-seeking costs. Each represents a social cost of Tullock rectangle loss in addition to the dead-weight or Harberger triangle loss that combined to form the Harberger-Tullock trapezoid social cost. The first Food Stamp Program in the United States came about through the rent-seeking and/or rent-avoiding efforts of farmers, grocers, bankers, and other economic agents and did not lead to the promotion of social welfare. The evidence of these self-interested efforts was gleaned from articles in the New York Times and government documents. The first Food Stamp Program also fits the economic theory of regulation developed by Stigler, Jordan, Peltzman and others, and it involved imposed costs on economic agents as the program evolved.     

A different perspective on operating leverage: Comments

A recent article in this journal by Dran (1991) suggests that the usual treatment of degree of operating leverage (DOL) is misleading because it improperly attributes the DOL to the ratio of fixed to total costs rather than the closeness of the firm’s output to breakeven. Managerial economics texts are clear in identification of DOL as an elasticity concept which varies with the nearness to break-even. Examples associating DOL with the relative level of fixed cost arise from association of higher fixed costs with higher breakeven points, and this appears to be the normal economic relationship.     

Do norms of decision-making styles,organizational design and management affect performance of Japanese firms? an exploratory study of medium and large firms

The success and resilience of Japanese firms have led many scholars and practitioners to theorize and speculate about the impact of what they have termed the 'Japanese management style' upon performance. There have been few studies that have attempted to explore empirically the links between the way Japanese firms organize, manage and decide, and their performance. This paper investigates the association between norms of decision-making style, organizational design and management, and some measures of firm performance. The empirical pattern of norms was assessed on the basis of responses of a random sample (N = 349) of Japanese managers. The study demonstrates that while there appears to be no support for the proposition that certain norms universally affect performance, in some sectors the impacts of norms on decision-making style, organizational design and management may be significant. The study concludes with the implications for theory building of this empirical exploration.     

Moment inequalities for order statistics from ordered families of distributions

Summary In this paper some inequalities for the variance and covariance of convex monotone functions of order statistics from ordered families of distributions are presented. The considered order relations in the set of distributions are the stochastic ordering relation and the convex ordering relation. Stochastic comparisons of spacings and their sums are also given. As corollaries the results for IFR and DFR distributions are obtained.     

Unfair dismissal legislation and property rights: some reflections

Starting from the premise that workers have ‘property rights’ in their jobs, this article considers ways in which British unfair dismissal legislation might be said to uphold such rights. The evidence indicates that remedies of compensation and re-employment afford minimal property rights to unfairly dismissed workers.     

THE JOINT ARRIVAL AND DEPARTURE PROCESS FOR THE M/M/l QUEUE

We consider the M/M/1-queue and derive an explicit expression for the joint distribution of the number of arrivals and the number of departures in [0, t), given the number of customers initially present. The derivation is almost purely combinatorial, it avoids the use of generating functions, and immediately yields a simple probabilistic interpretation of the result.     

Exact finite sample properties of double k-class estimators in simultaneous equations

In our earlier paper [Srivastava, Agnihotri and Dwivedi (1980)] the dominance of double k-class over k-class with respect to exact mean squared error matrix criteria is established. It is observed that given a member of k-class, one can pick up a member of double k-class that will provide an improved estimator of the coefficients. This result prompted us to study the exact finite sample properties of the double k-class estimator. For this, we have considered a structural equation containing two endogenous variables and have investigated the properties of double k-class estimators of the coefficients of explanatory endogenous variables assuming characterizing scalars to be non-stochastic.