Delegation and polarization of platforms in political competition

Summary. We consider a model of political competition among two ideological parties who are uncertain about the distribution of voters. The distinguishing feature of the model is that parties can delegate electoral decisions to candidates by nomination. It is shown that if the credible platform commitments of the candidates is feasible, then at least one of the parties nominates in equilibrium to a candidate who has an ideology that is more radical than the delegating party's ideology. In a variety of circumstances, this, in turn, yields a polarization of equilibrium policy choices of the candidates. It is thus argued formally here that strategic nomination of the candidates may well be one of the major reasons behind the well documented observation that the platforms associated with the political parties in two-party democracies are often surprisingly polarized. Received: January 10, 2002; revised version: May 8, 2002 RID="*" ID="*" We thank Alberto Alesina, Levent Ko?kesen, Antonio Merlo, Ronny Razin, Vijay Krishna, Alessandro Lizzeri, and seminar participants at Alicante, Columbia, Copenhagen, and NYU for helpful comments. We also thank an anonymous referee for its useful suggestions. A good fraction of this research was conducted while Ok was a visitor in the Department of Economics at University of Alicante; he thanks for the kind hospitality of this institution. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Education through grant CICYT BEC2001-0535 (Faulí-Oller) and BEC2001-0980 (Ortu?o-Ortín). Correspondence to:I. Ortu?o-Ortin     

The measurement of income mobility: A partial ordering approach

Summary. Given a set of longitudinal data pertaining to two populations, a question of interest is the following: Which population has experienced a greater extent of income mobility? The aim of the present paper is to develop a systematic way of answering this question. We first put forth four axioms for income movement-mobility indices, and show that a familiar class of measures is characterized by these axioms. An unambiguous (partial) ordering is then defined as the intersection of the (complete) orderings induced by the mobility measures which belong to the characterized class; a transformation of income distributions is “more mobile” than another if, and only if, the former is ranked higher than the latter for all mobility measures which satisfy our axioms. Unfortunately, our mobility ordering depends on a parameter, and therefore, it is not readily apparent how one can apply it to panel data directly. In the second part of the paper, therefore, we derive several sets of parameter-free necessary and sufficient conditions which allow one to use the proposed mobility ordering in making unambiguous income mobility comparisons in practice. Received: July 12, 1995; revised version: May 13, 1997     

Fuzzy measurement of income inequality: Some possibility results on the fuzzification of the lorenz ordering

Summary This paper starts from the premise that the concept of income inequality is ill-defined, and hence, it studies the measurement of income inequality from a fuzzy set theoretical point of view. It is argued that the standard (fuzzy) transitivity concepts are not compatible with fuzzy inequality orderings which respect Lorenz ordering. For instance, we show that there does not exist a max-min transitive fuzzy relation on a given income distribution space which ranks distributions unambiguously according to the Lorenz criterion whenever they can actually be ranked by it. Weakening the imposed transitivity concept, it is possible to escape from the noted impossibility theorems. We introduce some alternative transitivity concepts for fuzzy relations, and subsequently, construct a class of fuzzy orderings which preserve Lorenz ordering and satisfy these alternative transitivities. It is also shown that fuzzy measurement can be used to construct confidence intervals for the crisp conclusions of inequality indices.I wish to thank Ashish Banerjee, Kaushik Basu, Larry Blume, Gary Fields, Semih Koray, Tapan Mitra, Antony Shorrocks, Sinan Unur and two anonymous referees of this journal for insighthul comments and suggestions. I am also grateful to the participants of the 1993 Midwest Mathematical Economics Conference held in University of Wisconsin at Madison and the 2nd International Meeting of the Society for Social Choice and Welfare held in University of Rochester.     

Food consumption and economic development in Turkey and European Union countries

This study investigates the relationship between food consumption and economic development in Turkey and European Union countries. Differences in food diets are analysed by using data on per capita consumption in caloric terms based on the period from 1970 to 2000. The cluster analysis is employed to derive country grouping on the basis of similarities in dietary structure in the 1970 and 2000. Existence of a trend towards a common European diet is explored with Beta convergence. The empirical results show that per capita food consumption is becoming less responsive to changes in income and appears to be reaching a ceiling in the majority of EU countries and Turkey. However, the share of animal products in food consumption diet is low and income expenditure elasticity of animal products is higher with 0.84 values in Turkey than that in European countries in 2000. There are great differences in dietary structure between Turkey and the European Union. Differences also exist between European Union countries; however, despite these differences there is a general tendency for dietary structure to become increasingly similar across the majority of European Union countries. The result also supports the absence of a convergence towards a common diet if Turkey joins the European Union.     

Bayesian estimation of log odds ratios from R × C and 2 × 2 × K contingency tables

In this paper, Bayesian estimation of log odds ratios over R × C and 2 × 2 × K contingency tables is considered, which is practically reasonable in the presence of prior information. Likelihood functions for log odds ratios are derived for each table structure. A prior specification strategy is proposed. Posterior inferences are drawn using Gibbs sampling and Metropolis–Hastings algorithm. Two numerical examples are given to illustrate the matters argued.     

Strategic Delegation By Unobservable Incentive Contracts

Many strategic interactions in the real world take place among delegates empowered to act on behalf of others. Although there may be a multitude of reasons why delegation arises in reality, one intriguing possibility is that it yields a strategic advantage to the delegating party. In the case where only one party has the option to delegate, we analyse the possibility that strategic delegation arises as an equilibrium outcome under completely unobservable incentive contracts within the class of two-person extensive form games. We show that delegation may arise solely due to strategic reasons in quite general economic environments even under unobservable contracts. Furthermore, under some reasonable restrictions on out-of-equilibrium beliefs and actions of the outside party, strategic delegation is shown to be the only equilibrium outcome.     

Perceptions and knowledge of accounting professionals on IFRS for SMEs: Evidence from Turkey

This exploratory study extends the literature on IFRS for SMEs issued by the IASB in July 2009, and adopted by Turkey in November 2010. A questionnaire survey, based on the relevant literature and IFRS for SMEs, was developed. The aim was to investigate basic knowledge and perceptions of accountants regarding IFRS for SMEs. Our findings suggest that proponents of stand-alone IFRS for SMEs outnumber its opponents. The respondents are not highly informed about the omission of certain topics in IFRS for SMEs. Their awareness of valuation methods/concepts in IFRS for SMEs is at a moderate level. Inadequacy of accounting personnel’s training and lack of training programs arranged by professional bodies are considered to be the most serious obstacles in implementation of the standards. The majority of the participants are not aware of the key differences between full IFRS and IFRS for SMEs and simplifications made in IFRS for SMEs. Accounting professionals who are trained about IFRS for SMEs and the employees of Big4 auditing firms are more knowledgeable about the standards in comparison to others. Education level and experience of respondents have partial positive impact on knowledge of the standards.     

On the multi-utility representation of preference relations

We develop the ordinal theory of (semi)continuous multi-utility representation for incomplete preference relations. We investigate the cases in which the representing sets of utility functions are either arbitrary or finite, and those cases in which the maps contained in these sets are required to be (semi)continuous. With the exception of the case where the representing set is required to be finite, we find that the requirements of such representations are surprisingly weak, pointing to a wide range of applicability of the representation theorems reported here. Some applications to decision theory under uncertainty and consumer theory are also considered.     

A theory of (relative) discounting

We derive a representation theorem for time preferences (on the prize-time space) which identifies a novel notion of relative discounting as the key ingredient. This representation covers a variety of time preference models, including the standard exponential and hyperbolic discounting models and certain non-transitive time preferences, such as the similarity-based and subadditive discounting models. Our axiomatic work thus unifies a number of seemingly disparate time preference structures, thereby providing a tractable mathematical format that allows for investigating certain economic environments without subscribing to a particular time preference model. This point is illustrated by means of an application to sequential bargaining theory.