Age effects in Okun’s law with different indicators of unemployment

We reassess the results from the literature on the relationship between the youth unemployment rate and GDP growth (Okun’s law), based on the concern that the unemployment rate is not an ideal indicator for teenagers and young adults. Using the unemployment ratio instead, we find that youth unemployment (15–24 years old) is not significantly more responsive to economic growth than prime-age (25–64) unemployment. However, compared to prime-age unemployment, teenagers’ unemployment (15–19) is relatively unresponsive, whereas young adult’s (20–24) unemployment is more strongly correlated with economic growth. These results are quite different than those obtained with the unemployment rate as the dependent variable.     

Exploring attitudes to edgy urban destinations: the case of Deptford,London

The role of tourists and tourism in urban development is not fully understood. Research has focused on tourism districts within city centres, but less is known about tourism in peripheral, less affluent urban districts. These areas can appeal to visitors as edgy alternatives to mainstream destinations. This study establishes who is interested in visiting and why, and it explores the underlying rationale for negative attitudes. The aims are addressed by an in-depth analysis of Deptford in South East London. This area is a relatively deprived part of a world city, albeit one that has long been earmarked as London's next cool district. The study uses a mix of different sources to analyse the case. Responses to a New York Times article on Deptford are analysed and the attitudes of actual visitors and key stakeholders are explored. The discussion includes an examination of different interpretations and attitudes towards the notion of edginess. Edginess is deemed attractive by certain audiences; something linked to a reverence for working-class life in the arts. The study concludes that, whilst edginess is a noted characteristic, what people appreciate about Deptford is its ‘distinctive ordinariness’ – its contrast with more polished and contrived urban districts.     

Alliances and negotiations: an incomplete information example

We study a bargaining game between an individual and an ‘alliance’ in the sense of Manzini and Mariotti (J Econ Theory 121:128–41, 2005), in which the opponent of the alliance is incompletely informed about the relative strengths of its members. The best equilibrium outcome for the alliance under a unanimity rule is not attainable with a non-unanimity rule. However, unlike in the complete information model, less than optimal outcomes and delays may occur with positive probability even under unanimity, depending on the prior beliefs and the preferences of the agents. We are grateful to a careful referee for comments. We wish to thank Clara Ponsati for useful comments.     

Fairness and intentionality in children’s decision-making

Few studies have addressed the role of different aspects of the Theory of Mind (ToM) (intentionality and false belief understanding) in decision-making by adults playing strategic games where the importance of fairness is crucial. Even more interesting, this topic has been less investigated with children. The goal of this research was to explore the development of the decisional behavior along with the understanding of fairness, intentions and first- and second-order false belief understanding in children who are just acquiring those abilities. Multiple rounds of the ultimatum game with a human and a non-human partner (child/roulette wheel) were played by 177 children in the age range of 5–10 years, who also completed classic false belief tasks. Results confirm the key role of fairness sensibility across age groups and different degrees of the relevance of ToM according to the variability of children’s decisional behavior (stable vs. dynamic).     

Investment timing and learning externalities

We study a duopoly model of investment, in which each player learns about the quality of a common value project by observing some public background information, and possibly the experience of his rival. Investment costs are private information, and the background signal takes the form of a Poisson process conditional on the quality of the project being low. The resulting attrition game has a unique, symmetric equilibrium, which depends on initial public beliefs. We determine the impact of changes in the cost and signal distributions on investment timing, and how equilibrium is affected when a first-mover advantage is introduced.     

Alliances and negotiations

Negotiations often occur not between individuals but among groups (companies, trade unions, political parties, etc.) each representing composite interests, whose bargaining behaviour is regulated by some collective decision mechanism. In this paper we provide a natural model of such circumstances. We formalise the notion of ‘alliance’ and show how different preference aggregation procedures within the alliance affect the bargaining outcome. In particular, we find that unanimity procedures lead to ‘more aggressive’ negotiating tactics than majority procedures.     

Fair Bargains: Distributive Justice and Nash Bargaining Theory

The Suppes–Sen dominance relation is a weak criterion of impartiality in distributive justice. I propose its application to Nash bargaining theory. The Nash Bargaining Solution (NBS) is characterized by replacing the controversial Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives axiom with an axiom embodying the Suppes–Sen principle. This allows a clear interpretation of the NBS as a fair arbitration scheme. In addition, the proposed characterization is more robust than the standard one with respect to variations in the domain of bargaining problems.     

On the impossibility of complete Non-Interference in Paretian social judgements

We study a principle of ‘Non-Interference’ in social welfare judgements. Non-Interference captures aspects of liberal approaches (particularly a Millian approach) to social decision making. In its full generality, Non-Interference produces an impossibility result: together with Weak Pareto Optimality, it implies that a social welfare ordering must be dictatorial. However, interesting restricted versions of Non-Interference are compatible with standard social welfare orderings.     

Allocating chances of success in finite and infinite societies: The utilitarian criterion

We study a particular collective choice problem, that of allocating chances of success. We argue that many problems of interest have this nature, from small scale problems like medical triage to large scale ones like the allocation of opportunities in society. We consider both finite and infinite societies. We characterise utilitarian-type criteria by means of new properties tailored to the probabilistic structure of the alternatives.     

Alternative paths for the growth of e-commerce

Electronic commerce promises to be the drive behind a new wave of economic growth. Yet, the actual achievement of the prospected benefits and their allocation will depend on the features of the business models driving the diffusion of the new sales channel. The paper rejects the existence of a deterministic relation between e-commerce technological features and the structure of future electronic markets. Accordingly, alternative growth paths are explored and different scenarios are sketched depending upon the prevailing nature of the economic relations among the involved actors. For each scenario, the paper discusses the implications in terms of e-commerce diffusion speed and benefits allocation. The analysis of possible growth paths reveal that public intervention plays a non-negligible role in shaping the business model(s) that will eventually emerge, hence the impact of e-commerce on social welfare.