growth forecasts belief manipulation and capital markets abstract we analyze how a benevolent privately informed government agency would optimally release information about the economy s growth rate when the agents hold heterogeneous beliefs we model two types of agent conforming and dissenting the former has a prior that is identical to that of the government agency whereas the latter has a prior that differs from that of the government agency we identify both informative and uninformative equilibria informative equilibria are equilibria in which the government agency s equilibrium signal leads to a revision of beliefs we demonstrate that the uninformative equilibria can in fact dominate the informative ones in terms of ex post social welfare

a model of public consultation why is binary communication so common this article studies information transmission between multiple agents with heterogeneous preferences and a welfare maximising decision maker who chooses the quality or quantity of a public good e g size of a public project pace of lectures in a classroom government regulation that is consumed by all of them as the number of agents becomes larger the quality of information transmission diminishes the use of binary messages e g yes or no is shown to be a robust mode of communication even when the preferences and policy space are non binary

commuting patterns and firm decentralization since most employed individuals must travel between home and work on a daily basis work place commuting has provided the point of departure for the monocentric model of residential location alonso 1964 mills 1972 muth 1969 one of the major behavioral assumptions of the monocentric model is that consumers prefer less commuting to more all else equal hence the model predicts that workers will take advantage of any opportunity to reduce their commutes in the monocentric situation in which all employment is located at the central business district cbd no such opportunity arises however decentralized firm location enables workers to shorten their commutes as firms have left the cbd to move into the residential area the monocentric model thus predicts that if firms have decentralized workers should have very short commutes in longrun equilibrium however significant commuting persists in the face of large scale firm decentralization such commuting leads to the belief that frictions with respect to residential and job mobility exist which prevent workers from achieving the long run equilibrium solution predicted by the monocentric model in this paper i hypothesize that individuals with greater job and residential mobility will have shorter commutes given decentralized firm location residential and job mobility are further hypothesized to be functions of socio economic and employment characteristics the results show sex income race household responsibilities and job mobility to be important in determining commuting behavior the monocentric model is based on a separation of the house and work place theoretically this separation can be measured either in terms of commuting time or distance however most tests of the monocentric model have used commuting distance hamilton 1982 blackley and follain 1987 the time vs distance issue is explicitly addressed in this paper by using both measures in the estimations the results

voting behavior and information aggregation in elections with private information we analyze two candidate elections in which voters are uncertain about the realization of a state variable that affects the utility of all voters each voter has noisy private information about the state variable we show that the fraction of voters whose vote depends on their private information goes to zero as the size of the electorate goes to infinity nevertheless elections fully aggregate information in the sense that the chosen candidate would not change if all private information were common knowledge equilibrium voting behavior is to a large extent determined by the electoral rule i e if a candidate is required to get at least x percent of the vote in order to win the election then in equilibrium this candidate gets very close to x percent of the vote with probability close to one finally if the distribution from which preferences are drawn is uncertain then elections will generally not satisfy full information equivalence and the fraction of voters who take informative action does not converge to zero

a model of expertise we study a model in which perfectly informed experts offer advice to a decision maker whose actions affect the welfare of all experts are biased and thus may wish to pull the decision maker in different directions and to different degrees when the decision maker consults only a single expert the expert withholds substantial information from the decision maker we ask whether this situation is improved by having the decision maker sequentially consult two experts we first show that there is no perfect bayesian equilibrium in which full revelation occurs when both experts are biased in the same direction it is never beneficial to consult both in contrast when experts are biased in opposite directions it is always beneficial to consult both indeed in this case full revelation may be induced in an extended debate by introducing the possibility of rebuttal

prices and social behaviour evidence from adult smoking in canadian aboriginal communities this paper provides estimates of tobacco price elasticity explicitly distinguishing between two price effects the direct effect reflecting individual reaction to a price change and the indirect effect whereby price influences the individual by changing community smoking behaviour canada s aboriginal communities are small and secluded allowing for plausible identification of reference groups on a relatively large scale estimates suggest a 10 increase in price decreases daily smoking by 0 91 percentage points 2 11 occasional smoking by 1 24 percentage points 8 27 and average smoking intensity by 0 15 cigarettes per day 2 9 it is found that the indirect effect almost doubles the response to a change in tobacco prices over the direct effect alone

the influence of uncertain job location on urban form and the journey to work abstract standard urban models assume residents never think about their next job more likely the individual value of a given home and the choice of commute length are based not only on the current job site but also on the expectation of where future jobs will be and the likelihood of both job separations and residential moves the first factor lessens the value of access to the present job while the second determines the opportunity cost of moving both sets of factors lead to flatter rent gradients and more sprawl than predicted by standard theories the analysis further suggests that relatively stable jobs are likely associated with relatively shorter commutes past studies of the regional balance of jobs and housing of wasteful commuting of differences in the length of commute by gender and of spatial tests for discrimination in housing and local labor markets have neglected these considerations and may yield biased results as a consequence

a structural dynamic analysis of job turnover and the costs associated with moving to another job this paper provides an empirical analysis of the labor market behavior of employed individuals using a structural on the job search model the costs associated with moving to another job are allowed to be nonzero and may depend on the wage level it is shown that under certain conditions the optimal strategy has the reservation wage property the model is estimated using data on job durations and subjective responses concerning the search strategy the results reveal some strong sources of inflexibility of the labor market copyright 1992 by royal economic society

the theory of implementation when the planner is a player abstract in this paper we study a situation where the planner cannot commit to a mechanism and the outcome function is substituted by the planner herself we assume i agents have complete information and play simultaneously and ii given the messages announced by the agents the planner reacts in an optimal way given her beliefs this transforms the implementation problem into a signaling game we derive necessary and sufficient conditions for interactive implementation under different restrictions on the planner s out of equilibrium beliefs we compare our results to standard results on nash implementation journal of economic literatureclassification numbers c72 d71 d82

when does coordination require centralization this paper compares centralized and decentralized coordination when manag ers are privately informed and communicate strategically we consider a multi divisional organization in which decisions must be adapted to local conditions but also coordinated with each other information about local conditions is dispersed and held by self interested division managers who communicate via cheap talk the only available formal mechanism is the allocation of decision rights we show that a higher need for coordination improves horizontal com

information aggregation in debate who should speak first abstract privately informed individuals speak openly in front of other members of a committee about the desirability of a public decision each individual wishes to appear well informed for any given order of speech committee members may herd by suppressing their true information with individuals of heterogeneous expertise optimizing over the order of speech can improve the extraction of information but not perfectly so it is not always optimal to use the common anti seniority rule whereby experts speak in order of increasing expertise a committee with more able experts may be afflicted by greater herding problems yielding a worse outcome

continuous decisions by a committee median versus average mechanisms abstract a group of strategic agents with diverse private information and interdependent preferences has to take a continuous collective decision i study the design of the decision making procedure from the viewpoint of a utilitarian social planner for uniformly distributed information the implementation of the average report as decision dominates the implementation of the median report when the set of admissible reports is optimally designed this is true for any number of agents and for any degree of interdependence the result extends to a general class of distributions when the number of agents is large

collective decisions with interdependent valuations abstract many collective decision problems have in common that individuals desired outcomes are correlated but not identical this paper studies collective decisions with private information about desired policies each agent holds private information which mainly concerns his own bliss point but private information also affects all other agents we concentrate on two specific mechanism the median and mean mechanisms establish the existence of symmetric bayesian nash equilibria of the corresponding games and compare the performance of the mechanisms for different degrees of interdependencies applications of our framework include the provision of public goods and the design of decision processes in international organizations

comparative statics in dynamic programming models with an application to job search abstract this paper presents a technique for qualitative comparative statics analysis in dynamic programming models let the value function be the fixed point of a contraction mapping which depends differentiably on some exogenous parameter ten the derivative of with respect to exists and is also the fixed point of a contraction mapping since this derivative is the fixed point of a contraction mapping its qualitative properties can be investigated using mathematical induction this comparative statics methodology is illustrated with an application to a model of job search

the spatial mismatch hypothesis what has the evidence shown this paper reviews 20 years worth of empirical evidence on the spatial mismatch hypothesis after briefly surveying the relevant models from urban and labour economics and recent trends in employment and population suburbanisation the empirical evidence on spatial effects is examined this literature includes evidence on the effects of residential segregation residential suburbanisation and employment suburbanisation and direct measures of access such as travel times the most recent evidence suggests that spatial mismatch is relevant for explaining black white employment differences though the magnitudes of these effects remain unclear

eliciting information from a large population abstract this paper studies information transmission in social surveys where a welfare maximizing decision maker communicates with a random sample of individuals from a large population who have heterogeneous preferences the population distribution of preferences is unknown and has to be estimated based on answers from the respondents the decision maker cannot identify the true distribution of preferences even if the sample size becomes arbitrarily large since the respondents have incentive to exaggerate their preferences especially as the sample size becomes larger and each respondent has weaker influence on the decision the quality of communication with each respondent may improve as the sample size becomes smaller and thus we identify the trade off between the quality and quantity of communication we show that the decision maker may prefer to sample a smaller number of individuals when the prior is weaker

commuting in search of jobs and residences abstract this paper introduces a model which includes residential job moving and commuting behavior when labor and housing markets are characterized by market imperfections imperfect information and moving costs we examine the consequences of these market imperfections on commuting behavior an empirical analysis of commuting behavior indicates that workers commute less if they receive more job offers

the substitution between moves and quits if a worker s workplace and residence locations do not maximize utility quits and moves are substitutes a quit or a move alone is more likely than both together records of a single company confirm this simultaneous bivariate probit estimates of move and quit behavior demonstrate that uncontrolled shocks to quits and moves are negatively correlated furthermore when the company relocated from the central business district to a suburb of its metropolitan area the occurrence of either a quit or a move virtually precluded the occurrence of the other among employees whose journeys to work were lengthened by the relocation copyright 1991 by royal economic society

information aggregation in polls we study information transmission via polling a policymaker polls constitu ents who differ in their information and ideology to determine policy full rev elation is an equilibrium in a poll with a small sample but not with a large one in large polls full information aggregation can arise in an equilibrium where constituents endogenously sort themselves into centrists who respond truth fully and extremists who do not we find polling statistics that ignore strate gic behavior yield biased estimators and mischaracterize the polvs margin of error we construct estimators that account for strategic behavior finally we compare polls and elections jel c42 d83

sex differences in urban commuting patterns this paper takes a new look both theoretical and empirical at the general question of what determines the pattern of urban workers commuting journeys and at the specific question of how women workers commuting journeys differ from those of men commuting journey length for urban workers has proved difficult to model because it stands at the intersection of urban and labor economic theories concerning the spatial location patterns of jobs and housing urban economists view workers as having fixed job locations at the center of the city and being compensated for longer commuting journeys by lower housing prices in the suburbs labor economists in contrast tend