Harry Clarke  Bao Jia Tan 《Economic Papers: A journal of applied economics and policy》2011,30(4):490-496

There is a straightforward economic case based on simple externality arguments for public policies to avert a tobacco‐induced health catastrophe in China. This contrasts with the situation of developed countries where controversial internality arguments must be invoked to provide an efficiency‐based rationale for policy. WHO evidence suggests that there is a widespread lack of knowledge on the adverse health implications of smoking among Chinese. This contributes to an asymmetric information rationale for tobacco control policy. In addition, there are severe direct externality issues associated with secondary tobacco smoke. Despite excises, the price of cigarettes in China remains low by international standards. In addition, attempts to implement “smoke‐free” zones in public areas have so far been unsuccessful. Candidate policy reforms include improved public provision of information on the health impacts of smoking, higher tobacco excises and increased efforts to encourage those who wish to continue smoking to do so by avoiding secondary tobacco smoke impacts on others.  相似文献   

    

Abderrahmane Ziad 《Journal of Mathematical Economics》1998,29(4):381-387

In this paper we formulate a family of conditions called `B_k-monotonicity' that are necessary for Nash implementation, where k is a natural number that indexes a particular condition, and where the condition only becomes more restrictive as k increases. B_k-monotonicity is in general a stricter condition than Maskin monotonicity, and can be used to show that certain social choice correspondences that satisfy Maskin monotonicity cannot be Nash implemented.  相似文献   

    

Pierre Mohnen 《Economic Systems Research》1997,9(1):3-8

As an introduction to this special issue on intersectoral R&D spillovers, I shall first explain what these spillovers are and how economists try to estimate them. I shall then describe the seven papers selected for this issue from the expanding literature on R&D spillovers, summarize their major results and suggest further avenues of research in this area.  相似文献   

    

Alexander Wolitzky 《Theoretical Economics》2010,5(3):479-518

This paper studies the price‐setting problem of a monopoly that in each time period has the option of failing to deliver its good after receiving payment. The monopoly may be induced to deliver the good if consumers expect that the monopoly will not deliver in the future if it does not deliver today. If the good is nondurable and consumers are anonymous, the monopoly's optimal strategy is to set a price equal to the static monopoly price each period if the discount factor is high enough, and otherwise to set the lowest price at which it can credibly promise to deliver the good. If the good is durable, we derive an intuitive lower bound on the monopoly's optimal profit for any discount factor and show that it converges to the optimal static monopoly profit as the discount factor converges to 1, in contrast to the Coase conjecture. We also show that rationing the good is never optimal for the monopoly if there is an efficient resale market and that the best equilibrium in which the monopoly always delivers involves a strictly decreasing price path that asymptotes to a level strictly above the ratio of the monopoly's marginal cost to the discount factor.  相似文献   

    

David Martimort  Humberto Moreira 《Theoretical Economics》2010,5(2):159-213

The provision of public goods under asymmetric information has most often been viewed as a mechanism design problem under the aegis of an uninformed mediator. This paper focuses on institutional contexts without such a mediator. Contributors privately informed on their willingness to pay non‐cooperatively offer contribution schedules to an agent who produces the public good on their behalf. In any separating and informative equilibrium of this common agency game under asymmetric information, instead of reducing marginal contributions to free‐ride on others, principals do so to screen the agent's endogenous private information obtained from privately observing other principals' offers. Under weak conditions, the existence of a differentiable equilibrium is shown. Equilibria are always ex post inefficient and interim efficient if and only if the type distribution has a linear inverse hazard rate. This points to the major inefficiency of contribution games under asymmetric information and stands in contrast to the more positive efficiency result that the common agency literature has unveiled when assuming complete information. Extensions of the model address direct contracting between principals, the existence of pooling uninformative equilibria, and the robustness of our findings to the possibility that principals entertain more complex communication with their agent.  相似文献   

    

Laurent Lamy 《Journal of Economic Theory》2009,144(1):390-413

The analysis of second price auctions with externalities is utterly modified if the seller is unable to commit not to participate in the mechanism. For the General Symmetric Model introduced by Milgrom and Weber [P. Milgrom, R. Weber, A theory of auctions and competitive bidding, Econometrica 50 (1982) 1089-1122] we characterize the full set of separating equilibria that are symmetric among buyers and with a strategic seller being able to bid in the same way as any buyer through a so-called shill bidding activity. The revenue ranking between first and second price auctions is different from the one arising in Milgrom and Weber: the benefits from the highlighted ‘Linkage Principle’ are counterbalanced by the ‘Shill Bidding Effect.’  相似文献   

    

Jan Hanousek  Evžen Kočenda  Jan Svejnar 《Economics of Transition》2009,17(1):43-73

We use new firm‐level data to examine the effects of firm divestitures and privatization on corporate performance in a rapidly emerging market economy. Unlike the existing literature, we control for accompanying ownership changes and the fact that divestitures and ownership are potentially endogenous variables. We find that divestitures increase the firm's profitability but do not alter its scale of operations, while the effect of privatization depends on the resulting ownership structure – sometimes improving performance and sometimes bringing about decline. The effects of privatization are thus more nuanced than suggested in earlier studies. Methodologically, our study provides evidence that it is important to control for changes in ownership when analyzing divestitures and to control for endogeneity, selection and data attrition when analyzing the effects of divestitures and privatization.  相似文献   

    

Kristian Behrens  Yasusada Murata 《Journal of Economic Theory》2007,136(1):776-787

We analyze a class of ‘large group’ Chamberlinian monopolistic competition models by applying different concepts of functional separability to the same set of first-order conditions for utility maximization. We show that multiplicatively quasi-separable (MQS) functions yield ‘constant relative risk aversion’ (CRRA), and, therefore ‘constant elasticity of substitution’ (CES), functions, whereas additively quasi-separable (AQS) functions yield ‘constant absolute risk aversion’ (CARA) functions. We then show that the CARA specification sheds new light on: (i) pro-competitive effects, i.e., profit-maximizing prices are decreasing in the mass of competing firms; and (ii) a competitive limit, i.e., profit-maximizing prices converge to marginal costs when the mass of competing firms becomes arbitrarily large.  相似文献   

    

Guido Cozzi  Paolo E. Giordani  Luca Zamparelli 《Journal of Economic Theory》2007,136(1):788-797

We provide a refoundation of the symmetric growth equilibrium characterizing the research sector of vertical R&D-driven growth models. We argue that the usual assumptions made in this class of models leave the agents indifferent as to where targeting research: hence, the problem of the allocation of R&D investment across sectors is indeterminate. By introducing an “?-contamination of confidence” in the expected distribution of R&D investment, we prove that the symmetric structure of R&D investment is the unique rational expectations equilibrium compatible with ambiguity-averse agents adopting a maxmin strategy.  相似文献   

    

David Andolfatto 《Journal of Economic Theory》2007,137(1):709-715

Green and Lin study a version of the Diamond-Dybvig model with a finite number of agents, independence (independent determination of each agent's type), and sequential service. For special preferences, they show that the ex ante first-best allocation is the unique equilibrium outcome of the model with private information about types. Via a simple argument, it is shown that uniqueness of the truth-telling equilibrium holds for general preferences—and, in particular, for a constrained-efficient allocation whether first-best or not. The crucial assumption is independence.  相似文献