transition economies performance and challenges i present data and assess the first twelve years of the transition from plan to market transformations have taken place but the income gap between the transition and advanced economies has widened transition countries further east have performed worse than those further west but policies matter all countries carried out quickly type i reforms such as macroeconomic stabilization price liberalization small scale privatization and breakup of state owned enterprises they differed in type ii reforms such as large scale privatization and development of banking and legal systems countries that developed a functioning legal framework and corporate governance have performed better than others

primaries and the new hampshire effect candidates for u s presidential elections are determined through sequential elections in single states the primaries we develop a model in which candidates can influence their winning probability in electoral districts by spending money on campaigning the equilibrium replicates several stylized facts very well campaigning is very intensive in the first district the outcome of the first election then creates an asymmetry in the candidates incentives to campaign in the next district which endogenously increases the equilibrium probability that the first winner wins in further districts on the normative side our model oers a possible explanation for the sequential organization it leads in expectation to a lower level of advertising expenditures than simultaneous elections moreover if one of the candidates is the more eective campaigner sequential elections also perform better with regard to the selection of the best candidate

a tale of two reforms i identify the absence of well functioning product markets in transition economies as a sufficient condition under which big bang reduces output initially while a chinese style reform increases output big bang dismantles central planning or centralized organization of production permitting monopolistic and vertically interdependent enterprises to pursue their own monopoly profits by restricting output and inter firm trade to the detriment of the economy as a whole the chinese reform by maintaining central planning but allowing enterprises to produce for the emerging product markets after they have fulfilled their output quotas under planning gives enterprises incentives to expand output beyond planned targets

when should a manufacturer share truthful manufacturing cost information with a dominant retailer abstract consider a dominated manufacturer manu supplying a dominant retailer reta manu knows the product s unit manufacturing cost m deterministically whereas reta knows it only in the form of an a priori subjective distribution m reta may implement any one of four contract formats price only franchise fee two part tariffs and menu of contracts mc this paper presents two groups of results the first group consists of procedures for reta to compute optimal parameters for each of these contract formats these first group results are then used to study i the conditions under which manu is interested in sharing his m information and thus improving reta s m perception and ii how such information sharing conditions are affected by the contract formats we find that i manu benefits from reducing reta s uncertainty on her m perception only when the product s profitability is quite small ii over a wide range of plausible conditions manu benefits from a poorer quality of reta s a priori m perception regardless of what contract format reta uses iii the range of conditions under which manu benefits from a poorer quality of reta s m perception is not altered or narrowed by reta s use of a more sophisticated contract format such as mc even though such channel coordinating contracts increase channel efficiency and reta s profit in short current methods cannot motivate manu to share m information honestly hence reta should not trust the m information provided by manu these results reveal an overlooked aspect amidst the popular bigger pie notion of supply chain cooperation and emphasize the need to develop arrangements that can truly motivate honest information sharing

reform without losers an interpretation of china s dual track approach to transition this paper develops a simple model to analyze the dual track approach to market liberalization as a mechanism for implementing efficient pareto improving economic reform that is reform achieving efficiency without creating losers the approach based on the continued enforcement of the existing plan while simultaneously liberalizing the market can be understood as a method for making implicit lump sum transfers to compensate potential losers of the reform the model highlights the critical roles of enforcement of the plan for achieving pareto improvement and full liberalization of the market track for achieving efficiency we examine how the dual track approach has worked in product and labor market liberalization in china

the binary policy model abstract we introduce a model of electoral competition with office motivated candidates who are exogenously committed to particular positions on some issues while they choose positions for the remaining issues a position is majority efficient if a candidate cannot make a majority of the electorate better off given his fixed positions we characterize existence conditions for majority efficient positions the candidates fixed positions in our framework imply that only some voters are swing voters and we analyze how the distribution of swing voters determines whether candidates choose majority efficient positions we also analyze plurality and runoff elections with multiple candidates in our framework

coordination mechanisms of supply chain systems supply chain management scm has become an important management paradigm as supply chain members are often separate and independent economic entities a key issue in scm is to develop mechanisms that can align their objectives and coordinate their activities so as to optimize system performance in this paper we provide a review of coordination mechanisms of supply chain systems in a framework that is based on supply chain decision structure and nature of demand this framework highlights the behavioral aspects and information need in the coordination of a supply chain the identification of these issues points out several directions of future research in this area

candidate competition and voter learning in the 2000 2012 us presidential primaries when candidates in primary elections are ideologically differentiated e g conservatives and moderates in the republican party then candidates with similar positions affect each others vote shares more strongly than candidates with different ideological positions we measure this effect in us presidential primaries and show that it is of first order importance we also show that voters beliefs about the candidates harden over the course of the primary as manifested in the variability of candidate vote shares we discuss models of sequential voting that cannot yield that pattern of results and propose an explanation based on a model with horizontally and vertically differentiated candidates and incompletely informed voters consistent with the predictions of this model we also show that in more conservative states low quality conservative candidates do better relative to high quality conservatives and vice versa

policy reform and growth in post soviet russia in pursuit of its transition from a command to a market economy russia has witnessed enormous regional differences in economic growth rates moreover the implementation of economic reforms has also differed markedly across regions we analyze whether regional differences in reform policies can account for regional differences in growth rates and conclude that to a considerable degree they can most notably we find that regional differences in price liberalization policies exhibit a positive direct correspondence with growth we also find that regional differences in large scale privatization exhibit a positive correspondence with the regional formation of new legal enterprises which in turn exhibits a strong positive correspondence with growth

modeling quantity discounts under general price sensitive demand functions optimal policies and relationships this paper presents models for determining optimal all unit and incremental quantity discount policies and investigates the effect of quantity discounts on increasing demand and ensuring pareto efficient transactions under general price sensitive demand functions the paper develops optimal quantity discount policies investigates their interrelationships and their benefits to both the supplier and the buyer and gains managerial insights for the scenarios of maximizing the supplier s profit and the joint profit we develop simple and efficient solution approaches for determining the all unit and the incremental optimal decision policies for general price sensitive demand functions we have three main findings first with price sensitive demand there are two incentives in offering quantity discounts increasing demand and ensuring pareto efficient transactions in most cases increasing demand dominates in justifying the offering of quantity discounts second using a single lot size associated with all efficient transactions as with the constant demand case does not hold with the price sensitive demand case third the optimal all unit quantity discount policy is equivalent to the optimal incremental quantity discount policy in benefiting both the supplier and the buyer

learning and coordination in the presidential primary system in elections with three or more candidates coordination among like minded voters is an important problem we analyze the trade off between coordination and learning about candidate quality under different temporal election systems in the context of the u s presidential primary system in our model candidates with different policy positions and qualities compete for the nomination and voters are uncertain about the candidates valence this setup generates two effects vote splitting i e several candidates in the same policy position compete for the same voter pool and voter learning as the results in earlier elections help voters to update their beliefs on candidate quality sequential voting minimizes vote splitting in late districts but voters may coordinate on a low quality candidate using the parameter estimates obtained from all the democratic and republican presidential primaries during 2000 2012 we conduct policy experiments such as replacing the current system with a simultaneous system adopting the reform proposal of the national association of secretaries of state or imposing party rules that lead to candidate withdrawal when pre specified conditions are met

the success and failure of reforms in transition economies this paper argues that an important reason why russia s performance and china s performance under capitalism have differed dramatically is that different arrangements governing the determination of prices and work practices evolved during the transition process in russia the arrangement which conferred monopoly rights to industry groups leftover from socialism prevented the adoption of better technology in china the arrangement that evolved contained no such monopoly elements the key factor in determining which arrangement evolved was the strength of the central government we put forth a model that implements these ideas and provide evidence in support of this theory

sequential or simultaneous elections a welfare analysis sequential or simultaneous this paper addresses a key question on the design of electoral systems should all voters vote on the same day or should elections be staggered with late voters observing early returns before making their decisions using a model of voting and social learning we illustrate that sequential elections place too much weight on the preferences and information of early states but also provide late voters with valuable information under simultaneous elections voters equally weigh the available information but place too much weight on their priors providing an inappropriate advantage to front runners given these trade offs simultaneous elections are welfare preferred if the front runner initially has a small advantage but sequential elections are welfare preferred if the front runner initially has a large advantage we then quantitatively evaluate this trade off using data based on the 2004 presidential primary the results suggest that simultaneous systems outperform sequential systems although the difference in welfare is relatively small

a dynamic model of privatization with endogenous post privatization performance this paper presents a dynamic model of privatization driven by improved institutional protection of private property rights and constrained by the buyer s financial constraints government ownership is more efficient than private ownership when private property rights are insecure improved institutional protection of property rights over time creates the need to privatize the buyer s financial constraints affect the timing of privatization causing the firm s post privatization performance either to improve or to deteriorate in the short run financial constraints also have the possibility of inducing an underpricing phenomenon during privatization where the firm is priced below both what the buyer is willing to pay and the buyer s ability to pay faster institutional development calls for earlier privatization but it also has the potential to either create or exacerbate deadweight losses associated with inefficient privatization a host of empirically testable implications are derived copyright wiley blackwell

bandwagons and momentum in sequential voting in this paper i show that an equilibrium exists to the sequential voting game in which a bandwagon begins with probability 1 these bandwagons are driven by a combination of beliefs and the desire of voters to vote for the winning candidate significantly in this equilibrium the pivot probability for each voter is non zero even in an infinite population consequently the bandwagons do not always start after one or at most two favourable decisions as do economic cascades and varying levels of informative voting are observed consistent with observations from sequential voting in u s presidential primaries further voters are exposed to counterintuitive incentives referred to as buyers remorse that have been attributed to real primary voters i also derive equilibrium behaviour in this environment when voting is simultaneous and compare the quality of information aggregation within each mechanism i relate the conclusions to u s presidential primaries and find they are consistent with a common conclusion about the front loading of the primary process that in tight elections with no front runner simultaneous voting is preferred whereas in lopsided elections sequential voting is preferred the superior performance of sequential voting in lopsided races is precisely because bandwagons occur copyright 2007 wiley blackwell

efficiency losses from tax distortions vs government control abstract given the strong theoretical presumption that state enterprises are less efficient than private enterprises why have countries often chosen state ownership this paper explores the hypothesis that high tax rates can distort the decisions of private enterprises by enough that state ownership becomes preferable on efficiency grounds the forecast is that state ownership should be seen primarily in settings with high explicit or implicit tax distortions to private behavior

games with incomplete information a simplified exposition with inventory management applications abstract in most existing literature in supply chain management it is assumed that the players possess complete information about the game i e the players payoff objective functions are assumed to be common knowledge for static and dynamic games with complete information the nash equilibrium and subgame perfect equilibrium are the standard solution concepts respectively for static and dynamic games with incomplete information the bayesian nash equilibrium and perfect bayesian equilibrium respectively are used as solution concepts after presenting a brief review of the static and dynamic games under complete information the application of these two games in inventory management is illustrated by using a single period stochastic inventory problem with two competing newsvendors next we illustrate the bayesian nash and perfect bayesian equilibrium solution concepts for the static and dynamic games under incomplete information with two competing newsvendors the expository nature of our paper may help researchers in inventory supply chain management gain easy access to the complicated notions related to the games played under incomplete information

an inverse economic lot sizing approach to eliciting supplier cost parameters recent literature on supply chain coordination offers a wide range of game theoretic and optimization approaches that ensure efficient planning in the supply chain but assume that the involved parties have complete information about each other however in reality complete information is rarely available and those models alone do not present any incentive for the parties to reveal their private information e g the cost parameters that they use when solving their planning problems this paper proposes an inverse lot sizing model for eliciting the cost parameters of a supplier from historic demand vs optimal delivery lot size pairs gathered during repeated earlier encounters it is assumed that the supplier solves a single item multi period uncapacitated lot sizing problem with backlogs to optimality to calculate its lot sizes and the buyer is aware of this fact the inverse lot sizing problem is reformulated to an inverse shortest path problem which is in turn solved as a linear program this model is used to compute the ratios of the supplier s cost parameters i e the setup the holding and the backlog cost parameters consistent with all the historic samples the elicited cost parameters can be used as input for various game theoretic or bilevel optimization models for supply chain coordination computational experiments on randomly generated problem instances indicate that the approach is very efficient in predicting future supplier actions from the historic records 2013 elsevier b v all rights reserved

contracting with an urgent supplier under cost information asymmetry abstract we investigate a contract setting problem faced by a manufacturer who can procure major modules from an overseas supplier as well as a local supplier the overseas supplier is prime and offers quality products whereas the local supplier is viewed only as a backup and its products are inferior in quality as the local supplier needs to put in additional effort to fulfill the urgent orders it is difficult for the manufacturer to estimate this urgent supplier s production cost this asymmetric cost information becomes an obstacle for the manufacturer in managing the urgent supplier in this paper we study two types of contingent contracts one is the common price only contract and the other is a contract menu consisting of a transfer payment and a lead time quotation we construct a stackelberg game model and evaluate how the involvement of an urgent supplier with private cost information affects performances of the prime supplier and the manufacturer in different scenarios with or without the urgent supplier under different contingent contracts we also conduct numerical experiments to show how the parameters of the contracts affect profits of the manufacturer

dynamic version of the economic lot size model this article originally appeared in management science october 1958 volume 5 number 1 pp 89 96 published by the institute of management sciences a forward algorithm for a solution to the following dynamic version of the economic lot size model is given allowing the possibility of demands for a single item inventory holding charges and setup costs to vary over n periods we desire a minimum total cost inventory management scheme which satisfies known demand in every period disjoint planning horizons are shown to be possible which eliminate the necessity of having data for the full n periods

games with incomplete information game theory is a theory of strategic interaction that is to say it is a theory of rational behavior in social situations in which each player has to choose his moves on the basis of what he thinks the other players countermoves are likely to be