Preference for flexibility in infinite horizon problems

Summary. We consider the extension of the classical problem of preference for flexibility to many periods. Preferences are defined over sets of infinite paths of choices. The main result provides a set of axioms on preferences that yield an additive representation over a subjective state space. This space is the set of preferences over choice today and feasible set tomorrow. The main new axiom, stochastic dominance, is a stronger form of the assumption of monotonicity. Received: September 11 2000; revised version: December 18, 2001     

Growth in economies with non convexities: sunspots and lottery equilibria

Summary. We investigate the relation between lotteries and sunspot allocations in a dynamic economy where the utility functions are not concave. In an intertemporal competitive economy, the household consumption set is identified with the set of lotteries, while in the intertemporal sunspot economy it is the set of measurable allocations in the given probability space of sunspots. Sunspot intertemporal equilibria whenever they exist are efficient, independently of the sunspot space specification. If feasibility is, at each point in time, a restriction over the average value of the lotteries, competitive equilibrium prices are linear in basic commodities and intertemporal sunspot and competitive equilibria are equivalent. Two models have this feature: Large economies and economies with semi-linear technologies. We provide examples showing that in general, intertemporal competitive equilibrium prices are non-linear in basic commodities and, hence, intertemporal sunspot equilibria do not exist. The competitive static equilibrium allocations are stationary, intertemporal equilibrium allocations, but the static sunspot equilibria need not to be stationary, intertemporal sunspot equilibria. We construct examples of non-convex economies with indeterminate and Pareto ranked static sunspot equilibrium allocations associated to distinct specifications of the sunspot probability space.Received: 25 August 2003, Revised: 16 March 2004, JEL Classification Numbers: D84, D90.Correspondence to: Paolo SiconolfiWe thank Herakles Polemarchakis for helpful conversations on the topic. The research of Aldo Rustichini was supported by the NSF grant NSF/SES-0136556.     

Big BRICs,weak foundations: The beginning of public elementary education in Brazil,Russia, India,and China

Our paper provides a comparative perspective on the development of public primary education in four of the largest developing economies circa 1910: Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC). These four countries encompassed more than 50% of the world's population in 1910, but remarkably few of their citizens attended any school by the early 20th century. We present new, comparable data on school inputs and outputs for BRIC drawn from contemporary surveys and government documents. Recent studies emphasize the importance of political decentralization, and relatively broad political voice for the early spread of public primary education in developed economies. We identify the former and the lack of the latter to be important in the context of BRIC, but we also outline how other factors such as factor endowments, colonialism, serfdom, and, especially, the characteristics of the political and economic elite help explain the low achievement levels of these four countries and the incredible amount of heterogeneity within each of them.     

COMMUNICATION PROCESSES AND THE ‘NEW PUBLIC SPACE’ IN ITALY AND THE USA: A LONGITUDINAL APPROACH

Since the time of ancient Greece, democracy and communication have ineluctably been linked. Seen with the eyes of the Greek citizens, the agora was a somewhat mystical space where direct involvement and face‐to‐face communication processes paved the way to the kratos of the demos. After more than two thousand years, communication still remains closely linked to democracy, but the ever expanding dimension of modern societies calls for political representation. Consequently, the electoral arena has become a fictitious public space making democracy work. With the agency and the communication theories in the background, the present authors claim that following the advent of the most incredible technological discontinuity in history, things seem to have taken a jump back in time. The widespread dissemination of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), in fact, was crucial to the emergence of a ‘new public space’ bringing with it the poetry of a mirrored image of the ancient agora. Such new public space will be analysed with reference to the US and Italian governments at a federal and central level in order to gain a better understanding of how government‐citizens relationships are fashioned in both contexts. As we will see, each understanding of democracy argues for a different design of government‐citizens relationships. Consequently, both positive and recalcitrant attitudes towards a citizens’ greater involvement in policy making are often due more to cultural than to technological barriers. Their removal has to pass through the awareness that ICT may have profound consequences for democracy: their real power lies in their capacity to integrate political representation with new forms of citizens’ direct involvement in public life while consequently reinvigorating the pluralistic attitudes of the agora even in large‐scale modern democracies.     

Economies with observable types

We study economies of asymmetric information with observable types. Trade takes place in lotteries. Individuals face a standard budget constraint, while the incentive compatibility constraints are imposed on the production set of the intermediaries. This formalization encompasses moral hazard, as in [Jerez, 2003] and [Jerez, 2005], and private information economies. Equilibrium allocations are constrained efficient, but, contrary to what stated for example in Jerez (2005), the set of equilibrium allocations may be empty and the Second Welfare Theorem may fail. This happens for two reasons. First, constrained efficient allocations may violate the necessary and sufficient conditions of price supportability for the individuals. Second, even when constrained efficient allocation are price supportable, they may fail to be a profit maximizing choice of the firm at the individual supporting prices. To restore existence of an equilibrium the firm has to be restricted to supply allocations with support in the set of incentive compatible contracts.     

A brain imaging study of the choice procedure

We study the behavior of subjects facing choices between certain, risky, and ambiguous lotteries. Subjects' choices are consistent with the economic theories modeling ambiguity aversion. Our results support the conjecture that subjects face choice tasks as an estimation of the value of the lotteries, and that the difficulty of the choice is an important explanatory variable (in addition to risk and ambiguity aversion).The brain imaging data suggest that such estimation is of an approximate nature when the choices involve ambiguous and risky lotteries, as the regions in the brain that are activated are typically located in parietal lobes. Thus such choices require mental faculties that are shared by all mammals, and in particular are independent of language. In contrast, choices involving partial ambiguous lotteries additionally produce an activation of the frontal region, which indicates a different, more sophisticated cognitive process.