Competitive equilibrium when preferences change over time

Summary. We show the existence of a competitive equilibrium in an economy with many consumers whose preferences may change over time. The demand correspondence of an individual consumer is determined by the set of subgame-perfect equilibrium outcomes in his intrapersonal game. For additively separable preferences with concave period utility functions that are unbounded above, this demand correspondence will satisfy the usual boundary conditions. Whenever consumers can recall their own mixed actions, this correspondence is convex-valued. This ensures the existence of a symmetric competitive equilibrium.Received: 29 July 2004, Revised: 17 November 2004, JEL Classification Numbers: D51, D91, C73. Correspondence to: Thomas MariottiWe thank Michele Piccione for useful comments and suggestions. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis or the Federal Reserve System.     

城市核心可持续发展研究的多学科调适理念

由于城市核心具备多方面的功能与价值特征 ,作者认为 ,其可持续发展战略需要从多学科角度进行融贯综合的研究 ,形成包含历史、创新、特色、环保、社区、经营诸多理念的新的城市化观 ,并以此为指导进行旧城更新 ,以达到城市核心文脉永驻、文化永续、魅力永存、环境平衡、社区永生、活力永现的目标 ,实现可持续发展。     

Assessment of the agricultural sustainability of Shaanxi Province,China

It is significant for the study on the sustainable development of regional agriculture to monitor and measurethe trend of agricultural development with an effective method. The sustainable development of regional agricultureshould accord with regional population, rural economic development, social progress, resource and environmentalsupport. This paper establishes the evaluating indicators system of sustainable development of regional agriculture,evaluates the agricultural sustainable development in Shaanxi Province with a comprehensive multi-indicator method,analyzes the support of resource and environment for regional agriculture by the resource-development index and theenvironment-development index, and gets the conclusion that the indicators, such as education level, the income gapbetween urban and rural residents, the per capita area under cultivation and the consumption of pesticides and chemicalfertilizers per hectare, are the main factors to restrict agricultural sustainability, and that the pressure of the developmentof subsystems of population, economy and society on the subsystems of resource and environment turns out to bestronger and stronger. Agricultural environment gets better, but resource becomes one of the important factors to restrictthe development of regional agriculture. In a word, this paper highlights the potentials and limitations of sustainableagriculture of Shaanxi and helps identify the development direction in the future.     

Capacity,sustainability, and the community benefits of municipal utility ownership in the United States

ABSTRACT

Most literature on utility sustainability focuses on internal operations; this misses the role that utilities could play within a community. This study measures the impact of municipal ownership of water and electric utilities on the sustainability policymaking of local governments. I find that municipalities with government-owned water utilities adopt more sustainability measures than those with investor-owned service. Similarly, municipally-owned electric utilities have higher levels of energy sustainability in the community, but not in government operations. The utilities provide fiscal and technical capacity to municipalities. Interdepartmental coordination also strongly predicts sustainability policymaking. This study brings potential community benefits to the discussion of private investment in public service delivery.     

Can intertemporal choice experiments elicit time preferences for consumption?

The paper considers what can be inferred about experimental subjects’ time preferences for consumption from responses to laboratory tasks involving tradeoffs between sums of money at different dates, if subjects can reschedule consumption spending relative to income in external capital markets. It distinguishes three approaches identifiable in the literature: the straightforward view; the separation view; and the censored data view. It shows that none of these is fully satisfactory and discusses the resulting implications for intertemporal decision-making experiments. JEL Classification C90, C91, D90, D91, D11, D12     

Diversification, convex preferences and non-empty core in the Choquet expected utility model

Summary. We show, in the Choquet expected utility model, that preference for diversification, that is, convex preferences, is equivalent to a concave utility index and a convex capacity. We then introduce a weaker notion of diversification, namely “sure diversification.” We show that this implies that the core of the capacity is non-empty. The converse holds under concavity of the utility index, which is itself equivalent to the notion of comonotone diversification, that we introduce. In an Anscombe-Aumann setting, preference for diversification is equivalent to convexity of the capacity and preference for sure diversification is equivalent to non-empty core. In the expected utility model, all these notions of diversification are equivalent and are represented by the concavity of the utility index. Received: July 27, 1999; revised version: November 7, 2000     

An effective going concern prediction model for the sustainability of enterprises and capital market development

The purpose of this study is to construct a two-stage effective and innovative going concern prediction model to predict going concern doubt for the sustainability of enterprises and capital market development. Samples of this study are the companies listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange or the Taipei Exchange, totalling 196 companies and including 49 companies with going concern doubt and 147 normal companies (with no going concern doubt). The data are taken from the Taiwan Economic Journal (TEJ) and the Market Observation Post System during the period from 2001 to 2016 (totalling 16 years). This study adopts a two-stage way to construct the going concern prediction models. In Stage I, the traditional statistical method of stepwise regression (SR) and the data mining technique artificial neural network (ANN) are applied to select the important variables. In Stage II, two decision tree algorithms (data mining techniques): classification and regression tree (CART) and C5.0 are used to establish the prediction models. The results show that the SR + CART model has the highest going concern prediction accuracy, with an overall accuracy of 87.42%.     

The Brand Choice Model of Wine Consumers: A Multinomial Logit Model

The objective of this study is to determine factors influencing brand preferences of wine consumers in the Marmara region where viniculture and wine production is so important in Turkey. First, the consumers’ preferences survey has been conducted with 1022 persons in the region randomly selected and evaluated. Then, the informative factors influencing brand preferences collected in these surveys have been determined by the multinomial logit model. A lot of independent variables have been used in the multinomial logit model, but, because some independent variables were not found as significant according to Likelihood Ratio test, these variables are not included in the multinomial logit analysis. Six important factors influencing wine brand preferences have been determined. These factors are brand change causes of consumers, occupation of consumers, marital status of consumers, birthplace of consumers, income of consumers and gender of consumers. In addition, whether the wine brand preferences are independent, has been tested with Testing Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives of Hausman. According to this test, it has been found that the wine brand preferences are independent.     

Evolutionary stability and lexicographic preferences

We explore the interaction between evolutionary stability and lexicographic preferences. To do so, we define a limit Nash equilibrium for a lexicographic game as the limit of Nash equilibria of nearby games with continuous preferences. Nash equilibria of lexicographic games are limit Nash equilibria, but not conversely. Modified evolutionarily stable strategies (Binmore and Samuelson, 1992. J. Econ. Theory 57, 278–305) are limit Nash equilibria. Modified evolutionary stability differs from “lexicographic evolutionarily stability” (defined by extending the common characterization of evolutionary stability to lexicographic preferences) in the order in which limits in the payoff space and the space of invasion barriers are taken.     

Impact of Divergent Consumer Confidence on Option Prices

This paper investigates the impact of divergent consumer confidence on option prices. To model this, we assume that consumers disagree on the expected growth rate of aggregate consumption. With other conditions unchanged in the discrete-time Black–Scholes option-pricing model, we show that the representative consumer will have declining relative risk aversion instead of the assumed constant relative risk aversion. In this case all options will be underpriced by the Black–Scholes model under the assumption of bivariate lognormality. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.