Nash implementation with partially honest individuals

We investigate the problem of Nash implementation in the presence of “partially honest” individuals. A partially honest player is one who has a strict preference for revealing the true state over lying when truthtelling does not lead to a worse outcome than that which obtains when lying. We show that when there are at least three individuals, all social choice correspondences satisfying No Veto Power can be implemented. If all individuals are partially honest and if the domain is separable, then all social choice functions can be implemented in strictly dominant strategies by a mechanism which does not use “integer/modulo games”. We also provide necessary and sufficient conditions for implementation in the two-person case, and describe some implications of these characterization conditions.     

The Competitive Effects of Price-Floors

Using Hotelling's model of locational competition, we show that a moderate price-floor destroys the maximal differentiation equilibrium, resulting in minimum differentiation. Equilibrium prices are lower than prices in the absence of a floor. A low price-floor can lead to multiple equilibria, with both minimum and maximum differentiation as possible outcomes.     

India's development in the era of growth

The recent growth pattern of India is set in the context ofthe parallel experience of China, the experience of povertyreduction is reviewed, and a number of papers illuminating India'sdevelopment are introduced.     

Informational Constraints and the Overlapping Generations Model: Folk and Anti-Folk Theorems

This paper analyses the sustainability of inter-generational transfers in Samuelson's consumption-loan model when agents are imperfectly informed about past events. We find that with mild informational constraints, transfers cannot be supported by pure-strategy equilibria. Mixed strategies allow transfers to be sustained even if agents have little information, so that a version of the Folk theorem holds. However, these equilibria are not robust. If each agent's utility function is subjected to a small random perturbation as in Harsanyi (1973), these mixed strategy equilibria unravel, and only the zero-transfer allocation survives as the unique rationalizable outcome. This result is an example of mixed strategy equilibrium of an extensive form game which cannot be purified.     

Minimum Wages for Ronald McDonald Monopsonies: a Theory of Monopsonistic Competition

Recent empirical work on the effects of minimum wages has called into question the conventional wisdom that minimum wages invariably reduce employment. We develop a model of monopsonistic competition with free entry to analyse the effects of minimum wages, and our predictions fit the empirical results closely. Under monopsonistic competition, we find that a rise in the minimum wage raises employment per firm, causes firm exit and may increase or reduce industry employment. Minimum wages increase welfare if they raise industry employment but welfare effects are ambiguous if employment falls.     

Macroeconomics of Agricultural Trade Liberalization

Abstract

In this article a macroeconomic model is built to examine interactions between the agricultural sector and the industrial sector in an emerging market economy. This article examines how monetary shock and real shocks produce agricultural price fluctuations and change in employment through multiple cross effects. Monetary shocks result in overshooting of primary commodity price while real shock in terms of rise in the production of primary commodity mitigates the volatility of primary price.     

Nash implementation through elementary mechanisms in economic environments

This paper identifies a class of mechanisms, called elementary mechanisms, which are (in a precisely defined sense) the “simplest” mechanisms that can implement efficient outcomes in economic environments. The class of social choice correspondences that can be implemented by elementary mechanisms is completely characterized in a variety of different economic contexts.     

Oligopsony and the distribution of wages

We propose a simple model of wage dispersion arising from oligopsonistic competition in the labor market. Our model has workers who are equally able but who have heterogeneous preferences for non-wage characteristics, while employers have heterogeneous productivity characteristics. We completely and explicitly solve for the equilibrium wage distribution and show that “inside” and “outside” forces interact in wage determination. This interaction generates spillover effects of minimum wages in a manner which is consistent with the empirical evidence.