fuel demand elasticities for energy and environmental policies indian sample survey evidence india has been running large scale interventions in the energy sector over the last decades still there is a dearth of reliable and readily available price and income elasticities of demand to base these on especially for domestic use of traditional fuels this study uses the linear approximate almost ideal demand system la aids using micro data of more than 100 000 households sampled across india the la aids model is expanded by specifying the intercept as a linear function of household characteristics marshallian and hicksian price and expenditure elasticities of demand for four main fuels are estimated for both urban and rural areas by different income groups these can be used to evaluate recent and current energy policies the results can also be used for energy projections and carbon dioxide simulations given different growth rates for different segments of the indian population

efficient resource allocation on the basis of priorities many institutions allocate resources by non market mechanisms based on priorities in this paper we introduce a model of resource allocation on the basis of priorities and address the following questions is it possible to allocate resources on the basis of any priority structure if yes when can we do this pareto efficiently without creating incentives for manipulation and consistently across different groups of agents and resource levels we adopt a basic indivisible objects model with a finite number of object types and a finite quota of goods of each type some interesting examples are the determination of access to education allocation of graduate houses offices or tasks agents are assumed to have strict preferences over object types and remaining unassigned an assignment is an allocation of the objects to the agents such that every agent receives at most one object a rule associates an assignment to each preference profile we formalize a priority structure to be a collection of strict priority rankings of individuals indexed by the object types where i a j would be read as i has higher priority for object a than j we assume that the priority structure is exogenously fixed and allow the preferences of the agents to vary a rule is said to violate a priority of i for a if there is a preference profile under which i envies j who is assigned a and publication information econometrica 70 6 november 2002 2489 2497 the copyright to this article is held by the econometric society http www econometricsociety org it may be downloaded printed and reproduced only for personal or classroom use absolutely no downloading or copying may be done for or on behalf of any for profit commercial firm or other commercial purpose without the explicit permission of the econometric society for this purpose contact julie p gordon executive director of the society at jpg northwestern edu i would like to thank faruk gul wolfgang pesendorfer the co editor the four anonymous referees and the participants of the micro theory lunch seminar in princeton university for their comments and suggestions

stable and efficient resource allocation under weak priorities abstract we study the indivisible object allocation problem without monetary transfer in which each object is endowed with a weak priority ordering over agents it is well known that stability is generally not compatible with efficiency we characterize the priority structures for which a stable and efficient assignment always exists as well as the priority structures that admit a stable efficient and group strategy proof rule while house allocation problems and housing markets are two classic families of allocation problems that admit a stable efficient and group strategy proof rule any priority augmented allocation problem with more than three objects admits such a rule if and only if it is decomposable into a sequence of subproblems each of which has the structure of a house allocation problem or a housing market

empowering change the effects of energy provision on individual aspirations in slum communities this paper discusses the role of energy provision in influencing the social aspirations of people living in slums we examine factors that influence the shift in aspirations in five slum settlements using data from 500 interviews conducted in serviced and non serviced slums from the state of gujarat in india the non serviced slums did not have access to basic services namely water sanitation energy roads solid waste and rainwater management we find empirical evidence which suggests that when basic infrastructure provisions are met slum dwellers shift their focus from lower order aspirations to the higher order aspirations like health education housing and land ownership we argue that energy provision enhances productivity and enables slum dwellers to shift their aspirations upwards furthermore we test the effect of work days lost due to illness on the relationship between higher order aspirations and aspirations for energy provision when provision of energy is low higher work day loss dampens higher order aspirations for policy makers this study highlights the critical link between the infrastructure services preferred by slum dwellers and their social aspirations for growth

matching markets with mixed ownership the case for a real life assignment mechanism we consider a common indivisible good allocation problem whose popular applications include on campus housing kidney exchange and school choice we show that the so called new house 4 nh4 mechanism which has been in use at mit since the 1980s is equivalent to a natural adaptation of the well known gale shapley gs mechanism we run two experiments comparing nh4 with the prominently advocated top trading cycles ttc mechanism and nh4 with gs we find that under nh4 the participation rate is significantly higher than under ttc based on a new ordinal test of efficiency nh4 is more likely to pareto dominate ttc

circumstance and choice the role of initial conditions and policies in transition economies the experience of countries in transition from a planned to a market oriented economy has varied greatly the clearest differences are between the east asian countries china and vietnam and the countries of central and eastern europe cee and the former soviet union fsu china and vietnam have contained inflation and benefited from continued high growth in gdp since the beginning of their reforms while all cee and fsu countries have experienced large declines in output and most have experienced hyperinflation but even in cee and the fsu differences are marked some countries have lost over half of their gdp and growth performance in a number of countries is still poor while others are growing strongly some are still suffering from high inflation while others have successfully reduced annual inflation what determines this divergence of outcomes across transition countries no study so far has analyzed the interaction of all factors including initial conditions political change and reforms in a unified framework including cee the fsu china and vietnam the authors examine these broader interactions but focus first on the role of initial conditions such as initial macroeconomic distortions and differences in economic structure and institutions which have been emphasized less in the literature they find that initial conditions and economic policy jointly determine the large differences in economic performance among the 28 transition economies in the sample initial conditions dominate in explaining inflation but economic liberalization is the most important factor determining differences in growth but reform policy choices are not exogenous they depend in turn on both initial conditions and political reform with political reform the most important determinant of the speed and comprehensiveness of economic liberalization other findings provide additional insight into these relationships results show that liberalization has a negative contemporaneous impact but a stronger positive effect on performance over time the results also show that macroeconomic and structural distortions are negatively related to both policy and performance regarding the former unfavorable initial conditions discourage policy reforms but do not diminish their effectiveness once they are implemented the authors find some evidence that the influence of initial conditions diminishes over time this is in part because many of the initial conditions are themselves modified in the course of transition monetary overhangs are dissipated through inflation industrial overhang is eroded as plants shut down and market memory returns through experience

preferences for domestic fuel analysis with socio economic factors and rankings in kolkata india abstract the choice of domestic fuel is a matter of great concern for households and policy makers in india this paper investigates the demand for domestic fuels when households face four choices fuelwood coal kerosene and lpg the study is based on a survey of 500 households in kolkata india the demand estimates are conducted using a two stage process where the first stage investigates choice and the second the quantity used determinants of fuel demand are identified and their relative importance shown extending the study the paper also analyses the choice of the main cooking fuel in terms of the households stated rankings of six fuels for five attributes the policy discussion indicates that subsidies have less potential to reduce polluting fuels such as coal and fuelwood due to weak cross price elasticities while increased availability of lpg and potentially also increased awareness of indoor air pollution have greater prospect

house allocation with transfers we consider the shapley scarf house allocation problem where monetary transfers are allowed we characterize the class of mechanisms that are strategy proof ex post individually rational ex post budget balanced and collusion proof in these mechanisms the price of each object is fixed in advance and the objects are reallocated according to the unique core assignment of the shapley scarf economy associated with the prices the special case in which all prices are zero is the core mechanism studied by shapley and scarf our mechanisms are compelling alternatives to the groves mechanisms which satisfy neither budget balance nor our condition of collusion proofness journal of economic literature classification numbers c71 c78 d71 d78 d89

house allocation with existing tenants an equivalence abstract we analyze two mechanisms designed to eliminate inefficiencies in house allocation problems where there are both existing tenants and newcomers the first mechanism chooses the unique core allocation of a sister exchange economy constructed by endowing each existing tenant with her current house and each newcomer with a random vacant house the second mechanism chooses an ordering from a given distribution and determines the final outcome as follows assign the agents the best available house one at a time following their ordering in the queue and whenever an agent demands the house of an existing tenant who is still in the line modify the queue by inserting the existing tenant at the top whenever a loop of existing tenants forms assign each of them the house she demands and proceed we show that the first mechanism is equivalent to an extreme case of the second which favors the newcomers

reassessing the energy ladder household energy use in maun botswana abstract in the context of sub saharan africa s rapid urbanization improved insight into urban energy use is increasingly important based on the predictions of energy transition theory a regional shift from biomass to modern fuels has long been expected to occur in tandem with urban growth however trends observed in the region s towns and cities have often not followed such patterns and fuelwood continues to be important in most areas this paper examines the practical relevance of transition theory using a recent case study conducted by the authors in maun botswana and results previously reported in the literature it finds that despite the long term link between socio economic development and increased modern fuel consumption at the national scale the notion of transition does not accurately reflect ongoing energy use patterns at lower levels of aggregation this is chiefly because its model of household fuel switching largely dismisses the importance of active and strategic decision making by urban consumers and their responsiveness to structural factors such as relative fuel prices as the botswana case illustrates this weakness can significantly distort expectations and policies around urban fuelwood use

strategyproof assignment by hierarchical exchange we give a characterization of the set of group strategyproof pareto optimal and reallocation proof allocation rules for the assignment problem where individuals are assigned at most one indivisible object without any medium of exchange although there are no property rights in the model the rules satisfying the above criteria imitate a trading procedure with individual endowments in which individuals exchange objects from their hierarchically determined endowment sets in an iterative manner in particular these assignment rules generalize gale s top trading cycle procedure the classical rule for the model in which each individual owns an indivisible good

richer and healthier but not greener choices concerning household energy use in india india is among the world lowest per capita greenhouse gas ghg emitters but rapid increases are expected at the same time world health organization who estimates show that 424 000 die prematurely in indian households each year from air pollution exposure due to solid fuel use we analyze ghg emissions and health through three policy scenarios for household energy using projections for population income and urbanization in policy scenarios called business as usual bau improved health and green future projected per capita household ghg emissions in 2026 increase by 169 164 and 139 respectively compared to 2001 whereas household mortality rates decrease by 45 67 and 45 respectively due to income growth and urbanization an increase in ghg emissions is likely inevitable but can be slowed for health in contrast improvements are expected and can be expanded

strategy proofness and essentially single valued cores in this paper we search for solutions to various classes of allocation problems we hand results pertaining to housing markets are much more encouraging roth 1982b shows that in the context of housing markets the core correspondence which is shown to be single valued by roth and postlewaite 1977 is strategy proof moreover ma 1994 shows that it is the only solution that is pareto efficient individually rational and strategy proof

dynamic kidney exchange we study how barter exchanges should be conducted through a centralized mechanism in a dynamically evolving agent pool with time and compatibility based preferences we derive the dynamically efficient two way and multi way exchange mechanisms that maximize total discounted exchange surplus recently several live donor kidney exchange programs were established to swap incompatible donors of end stage kidney disease patients since kidney exchange can be modeled as a special instance of our more general model dynamically efficient kidney exchange mechanisms are derived as corollaries we make policy recommendations using simulations

model projections for household energy use in india energy use in developing countries is heterogeneous across households present day global energy models are mostly too aggregate to account for this heterogeneity here a bottom up model for residential energy use that starts from key dynamic concepts on energy use in developing countries is presented and applied to india energy use and fuel choice is determined for five end use functions cooking water heating space heating lighting and appliances and for five different income quintiles in rural and urban areas the paper specifically explores the consequences of different assumptions for income distribution and rural electrification on residential sector energy use and co2 emissions finding that results are clearly sensitive to variations in these parameters as a result of population and economic growth total indian residential energy use is expected to increase by around 65 75 in 2050 compared to 2005 but residential carbon emissions may increase by up to 9 10 times the 2005 level while a more equal income distribution and rural electrification enhance the transition to commercial fuels and reduce poverty there is a trade off in terms of higher co2 emissions via increased electricity use

eliciting preferences to assign positions and compensation abstract we describe strategy proof rules for economies where an agent is assigned a position e g a job plus some of a divisible good for the 2 agent 2 position case we derive a robust characterization for the multi agent position case many arbitrary such rules exist so we consider additional requirements by also requiring coalitional strategy proofness or nonbossiness the range of a solution is restricted to the point that such rules are not more complex than those for the shapley scarf housing model no divisible good third we show that essentially only constant solutions are immune to manipulations involving bribes finally we demonstrate a conflict between efficiency and strategy proofness the results extend to models without externalities in which agents share positions journal of economic literature classification numbers c72 d70

behind the market stage where real societies exist part i the role of public and private order institutions this two part article is an attempt to clarify the social conditions upon which the viability and efficiency of the market system rest it strives to show that the embeddedness thesis that is an explanation based upon the existence of long run personal ties involving the use of reputation mechanisms among transactors cannot fully elucidate the question as to how the problem of trust is solved in market societies as explained in part i there are difficulties of both theoretical and empirical historical kinds and these explain why the market order needs to be sustained by private and public order institutions in part ii the role of generalised morality in backing or supplementing such institutions is discussed in the light of game theory and particular emphasis is put on the ability of moral norms to sustain honest behaviour by generating the right kind of preferences and establishing trust the vexed problem of the dynamics of norm emergence and erosion is then addressed with a view to showing

the probabilistic serial mechanism with private endowments abstract a random assignment is ordinally efficient if it is not stochastically dominated with respect to individual preferences over sure objects when there are no private endowments the set of ordinally efficient random assignments is characterized by the eating algorithm bogomolnaia and moulin 2001 when there are private endowments the main requirement is individual rationality however the eating algorithm fails to deliver this property our contribution is the natural generalization of the eating algorithm for this general class of problems the family of this generalized eating algorithm characterizes the set of individually rational and ordinally efficient random assignments a special solution in this family the individually rational probabilistic serial ps ir also achieves a new fairness axiom no justified envy however it is not immune to strategic manipulation we show that individual rationality no justified envy and strategy proofness are incompatible

strategy proofness and the core in house allocation problems abstract we study house allocation problems introduced by l shapley and h scarf 1974 j math econ 1 23 28 we prove that a mechanism a social choice function is individually rational anonymous strategy proof and nonbossy but not necessarily pareto efficient if and only if it is either the core mechanism or the no trade mechanism where the no trade mechanism is the one that selects the initial allocation for each profile of preferences this result confirms the intuition that even if we are willing to accept inefficiency there exists no interesting strategy proof mechanism other than the core mechanism journal of economic literature classification numbers c71 c78 d71 d78 d89

the injustice of inequality in many countries the operation of legal political and regulatory institutions is subverted by the wealthy and the politically powerful for their own benefit this subversion takes the form of corruption intimidation and other forms of influence we present a model of such institutional subversion focusing specifically on courts and of the effects of inequality in economic and political resources on the magnitude of subversion we then use the model to analyze the consequences of institutional subversion for the law and order environment in the country as well as for capital accumulation and growth we illustrate the model with historical evidence from gilded age united states and the transition economies of the 1990s we also present some cross country evidence consistent with the basic prediction of the model

coalitional strategy proof house allocation abstract we consider house allocation without endowments we show that there is a unique maximal domain including all strict preferences on which efficiency and coalitional strategy proofness are compatible a preference relation belongs to the unique maximal domain if it is a strict descending ranking of houses to a certain house and indifference holds over it and the remaining houses we also show that on this domain mixed dictator pairwise exchange rules are the only rules satisfying efficiency and coalitional strategy proofness journal of economic literature classification numbers c78 d63 d71

an experimental study of house allocation mechanisms we report an experiment on three house allocation mechanisms under complete information random serial dictatorship with squatting rights and two variants of the top trading cycles mechanism results show that the latter two are significantly more efficient than the former d 2004 elsevier b v all rights reserved

urban household energy use in india efficiency and policy implications biomass based fuels are being steadily replaced with modern fossil fuels and electricity in cities of developing countries the latter energy sources are more convenient and efficient to use and produce less local pollutants this fuel transition has accompanied economic growth in many cities empirical data to substantiate these generalizations are being gathered by researchers we report on a recent survey of household energy use in the city of hyderabad india the survey reveals that the underlying fuel transition is consistent with that in other developing country cities government policy however has favored the rich because of the inequities in fuel and equipment availability among income groups we report the major findings of the survey in context of other data for india and suggest policy changes to redress these inequities

incentive compatibility in a market with indivisible goods abstract in a market in which each trader s initial endowment is one unit of an indivisible good there exists an incentive compatible procedure for reaching a competitive allocation this contrasts with some recent results for similar problems

reclaim proof allocation of indivisible objects abstract we study desirability axioms imposed on allocations in indivisible object allocation problems the existing axioms in the literature are various conditions of robustness to blocking coalitions with respect to agents ex ante individual rationality and group rationality and ex post pareto efficiency endowments we introduce a stringent axiom that encompasses and strengthens the existing ones an allocation is reclaim proof if it is robust to blocking coalitions with respect to any conceivable interim endowments of agents this is an appealing property in dynamic settings where the assignments prescribed by an allocation to be implemented need to be made in multiple rounds rather than all in one shot we show that an allocation is reclaim proof if and only if it is induced by a yrmh igyt mechanism introduced by abdulkadiroglu and sonmez 1999 and if and only if it is a competitive allocation

government in transition abstract the speed of economic reforms is not the only important determinant of the success of the transition to a market economy the transition of government from a communist state to an institution supporting a market economy is as critical survey evidence shows that russia lags significantly behind poland in the transition of its government which may account for its inferior economic performance despite adopting similar economic reforms i argue that the lack of turnover of old communist politicians and the creation of inappropriate electoral and fiscal incentives for these politicians may account for the poor performance of the russian government and suggest some strategies for improving the situation

home grown or imported initial conditions external anchors and the determinants of institutional reform in the transition economies in this article we examine the determinants of institutional change using a panel dataset comprising 25 transition economies a defining characteristic of our approach is that we treat institutional change as a multidimensional unobserved variable accounting for the fact that each of our indicators represents a noisy signal our results suggest that institutional change is significantly path dependent however policy can to some extent break this dependence through economic and political liberalisation at the start of the transition and with the help of an external anchor such as eu accession