matching with waiting times the german entry level labor market for lawyers abstract we study the allocation of german lawyers to regional courts for legal trainee ships because of excess demand in some regions lawyers often have to wait before being allocated the currently used berlin mechanism is not weakly pareto efficient does not eliminate justified envy and does not respect improvements we introduce a mechanism based on the matching with contracts literature using waiting time as the contractual term the resulting mechanism is strategy proof weakly pareto efficient eliminates justified envy and respects improvements we extend our proposed mechanism to allow for a more flexible allocation of positions over time

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

walrasian equilibrium with gross substitutes in this paper we study the problem of efficient production and allocation of indivisible objects among a set of consumers we assume that the agents preferences depend on the bundle of objects and the quantity of money they consume furthermore we assume that preferences are quasilinear in money and that agents have a large endowment of money with indivisibilities it is well known that many familiar properties of the utility functions fail to ensure existence in their striking analysis of the matching problem kelso and crawford 5 introduce the gross substitutes gs condition which ensures the non emptiness of the core we propose two new conditions and show that with quasilinearity they are equivalent article id jeth 1999 2531 available online at http www idealibrary com on

why invest in wind energy career incentives and chinese renewable energy politics we study wind development at the provincial level in china modelling installed wind capacities as a function of both economics and politics we assume that the top provincial officials desire to maximize their chances of promotion under the chinese cadre evaluation system we expect that those with the strongest incentives to perform in order to achieve promotion would work harder to comply with the central government s policy agenda to promote renewable energy collecting and testing data on provincial leaders characteristics we find that provinces governed by party secretaries who were approaching the age of 65 are associated with significantly higher level of wind installed capacities this result supports the political tournaments theory of chinese politics we also find that better educated party secretaries are likely to be more supportive of renewable energy implying that education acts to encourage provincial leaders to support the central government s policy

convergence to efficiency in a simple market with incomplete information a model of trade with m buyers and m sellers is considered in which price is set to equate revealed demand and supply in a bayesian nash equilibrium each trader acts not as a price taker but instead misrepresents his true demand supply to influence price in his favor this causes inefficiency we show that in any equilibrium the amount by which a trader misreports is o 1 m and the corresponding inefficiency is o 1 m2 the indeterminacy and the inefficiency that is caused by the traders bargaining behavior in small markets thus rapidly vanishes as the market increases in size

global wind power development economics and policies abstract existing literature indicates that theoretically the earth s wind energy supply potential significantly exceeds global energy demand yet only 2 3 of global electricity demand is currently derived from wind power despite 27 annual growth in wind generating capacity over the last 17 years more than 95 of total current wind power capacity is installed in the developed countries plus china and india our analysis shows that the economic competitiveness of wind power varies at wider range across countries or locations a climate change damage cost of us 20 tco 2 imposed to fossil fuels would make onshore wind competitive to all fossil fuels for power generation however the same would not happen to offshore wind with few exceptions even if the damage cost is increased to us 100 tco 2 to overcome a large number of technical financial institutional market and other barriers to wind power many countries have employed various policy instruments including capital subsidies tax incentives tradable energy certificates feed in tariffs grid access guarantees and mandatory standards besides climate change mitigation policies such as the clean development mechanism have played a pivotal role in promoting wind power despite these policies intermittency the main technical constraint could remain as the major challenge to the future growth of wind power

research design meets market design using centralized assignment for impact evaluation a growing number of school districts use centralized assignment mechanisms to allocate school seats in a manner that reflects student preferences and school priorities many of these assignment schemes use lotteries to ration seats when schools are oversubscribed the resulting random assignment opens the door to credible quasi experimental research designs for the evaluation of school effectiveness yet the question of how best to separate the lottery generated randomization integral to such designs from non random preferences and priorities remains open this paper develops easily implemented empirical strategies that fully exploit the random assignment embedded in a wide class of mechanisms while also revealing why seats are randomized at one school but not another we use these methods to evaluate charter schools in denver one of a growing number of districts that combine charter and traditional public schools in a unified assignment system the resulting estimates show large achievement gains from charter school attendance our approach generates efficiency gains over ad hoc methods such as those that focus on schools ranked first while also identifying a more representative average causal effect we also show how to use centralized assignment mechanisms to identify causal effects in models with multiple school sectors

on the existence of a strictly strong nash equilibrium under the student optimal deferred acceptance algorithm abstract this study analyzes a preference revelation game in the student optimal deferred acceptance algorithm in a college admission problem we assume that each college s true preferences are known publicly and analyze the strategic behavior of students we demonstrate the existence of a strictly strong nash equilibrium in the preference revelation game through a simple algorithm that finds it specifically i the equilibrium outcome from our algorithm is the same matching as in the efficiency adjusted deferred acceptance algorithm and ii in a one to one matching market it coincides with the student optimal von neumann morgenstern vnm stable matching we also show that i when a strict core allocation in a housing market derived from a college admission market exists it can be supported by a strictly strong nash equilibrium and ii there exists a strictly strong nash equilibrium under the college optimal deferred acceptance algorithm if and only if the student optimal stable matching is pareto efficient for students

strategy proof exchange we consider the allocation of goods in exchange economies with a finite number of agents who may have private information about their preferences in such a setting standard allocation rules such as walrasian equilibria or rational expectations equilibria are not compatible with individual incentives we characterize the set of allocation rules which are incentive compatible or in other words the set of strategy proof social choice functions social choice functions which are strategy proof are those which can be obtained from trading according to a finite number of pre specified proportions the number of proportions which can be accommodated is proportional to the number of agents such rules are necessarily inefficient even in the limit as the economy grows

on two competing mechanisms for priority based allocation problems we consider the priority based allocation problem there is a set of indivisible objects with multiple supplies e g schools with seats and a set of agents e g students with priorities over objects e g proximity of residence area we study two well known and competing mechanisms the agentoptimal stable mechanism aosm allots objects via the deferred acceptance algorithm the top trading cycles mechanism ttcm allots objects via gale s top trading cycles algorithm we show that the two mechanisms are equivalent or ttcm is fair i e respects agents priorities or resource monotonic o rpopulation monotonic if and only if the priority structure is acyclic furthermore if aosm fails to be efficient consistent for a problem ttcm also fails to be fair consistent for it however the converse is not necessarily true

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

levelized cost of electricity lcoe of renewable energies and required subsidies in china newhuadu business school research fund china sustainable energy program g 1305 18257 national social science foundation of china 12zd059 ministry of education 10 jbg 013

approximately competitive equilibria in large finite economies abstract we consider exchange economies where each consumer may report or act according to any demand function provided that there exist situations that the consumer finds plausible in which the reported demand performs at least as well as the true demand we identify conditions under which as the size of the economy increases all the market clearing prices and allocations of the reported economy approximate the competitive equilibria of the true economy journal of economic literature classification numbers d51 d82

constrained school choice an experimental study 31 pages 18 tables jel classification c72 c78 d78 i20 trabajo publicado como articulo en american economic review 100 4 1860 1874 2010 http dx doi org 10 1257 aer 100 4 1860

entrepreneurship and organization design we model entrepreneurship and the emergence of firms as an outcome of simultaneous bidding for labor services among heterogeneous agents what distinguishes our approach from prior work is that occupational choice and job matching are determined simultaneously so that the opportunity costs of entrepreneurs are accounted for those who are relatively unmanageable while possibly excellent managers themselves become entrepreneurs entrepreneurs compete and create value by building efficient organizations and offering potentially well paid jobs to others while the entry of an additional entrepreneur typically reduces some individual wages we show that it always raises the average wage and depresses the average income of incumbent entrepreneurs this result may help explain the empirically low returns to entrepreneurship

the energy policy outlets for community acceptance of ecological investment in china abstract policy implication about satisfactions of energy use and housing are much sensitive to social discount rate changes which can increase the dissatisfaction of residential happiness because of an increasing price mechanism when per capita resource faces to decline we thus estimate the private expected rates of return on ecological investment to improve urban and peri urban environmental infrastructures are about to 7 54 and 18 37 respectively the endogeneities of income and saving rise can increase the uncertain part of private discount rate up to a higher estimated subjective social discount rate about 14 46 for urban or 8 86 for peri urban environmental infrastructures improvement the estimated time preference rate can be raised from 1 to 1 72 the prediction of these estimated private discount rate can ease at least 20 of the dissatisfaction to energy use and 10 of the dissatisfaction to housing conditions therefore we suggest opening the landscape rights to individual willingness to invest and providing options to let people pay a part of their pensions for temporal permits to living in some well served villages where are close to the places with advanced environmental amenities and being supported by central planning policy via the crowdfunding operation for improving environmental quality

efficient resource allocation under multi unit demand abstract we study resource allocation with multi unit demand such as the allocation of courses to students in contrast to the case of single unit demand no stable mechanism not even the student proposing deferred acceptance algorithm achieves desirable properties it is not strategy proof and the resulting allocation is not even weakly efficient under submitted preferences we characterize the priority structure of courses over students under which stability is consistent with strategy proofness or efficiency we show that stability is compatible with strategy proofness or efficiency if and only if the priority structure is essentially homogeneous this result suggests that efficient allocation under multi unit demand is difficult and that the use of stable mechanisms may not deliver desirable outcomes

substitutes and stability for matching with contracts we consider the matching problem with contracts of hatfield and milgrom 2005 and we introduce new concepts of bilateral and unilateral substitutes we show that bilateral substitutes is a sucient condition for the existence of a stable allocation in this framework however the set of stable allocations does not form a lattice under this condition and there does not necessarily exist a doctor optimal stable allocation under a slightly stronger condition unilateral substitutes the set of stable allocations still does not necessarily form a lattice with respect to doctors preferences but there does exist a doctor optimal stable allocation and other key results such as incentive compatibility and the rural hospitals theorem are recovered

show me the money interjurisdiction political competition and fiscal extraction in china we argue that interjurisdiction competition in authoritarian regimes engenders a specific logic for taxation promotion seeking local officials are incentivized to signal loyalty and competence to their principals through tangible fiscal revenues the greater the number of officials accountable to the same principal the more intense political competition is resulting in higher taxation however too many officials accountable to the same principal leads to lower taxation due to shirking by uncompetitive officials and the fear of political instability using a panel dataset of all chinese county level jurisdictions from 1999 2006 we find strong evidence for an inverse u shaped relationship between the number of county level jurisdictions within a prefecture our proxy for the intensity of political competition and fiscal revenues in most provinces but not so in politically unstable ethnic minority regions the results are robust to various alternative specifications including models that account for heterogeneous county characteristics and spatial interdependence

evaluating debt repurchases what are the alternatives to investment abstract a general model of debt repurchases is built which reconciles most points raised in the literature on buybacks the inclusion of assets alternative to domestic investment is shown to be of crucial importance in the analysis and leads to the reversal of some previous results it is shown that investment necessarily rises following a buyback independently of the source of the funds used the condition that determines whether or not buybacks are an attractive solution to the debtor is derived it is shown to depend on the price at which debt can be bought and on an interest differential effect

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

stability in large matching markets with complementarities labor markets can often be viewed as many to one matching markets it is well known that if complementarities are present in such markets a stable matching may not exist we study large random matching markets with couples we introduce a new matching algorithm and show that if the number of couples grows slower than the size of the market a stable matching will be found with high probability if however the number of couples grows at a linear rate with constant probability not depending on the market size no stable matching exists our results explain data from the market for psychology interns

debt and incentives in a dynamic context abstract the incentive problems associated with debt overhang have been shown to make debt forgiveness potentially pareto improving models studying this argument abstract from the long term character of the credit relationship we show that the debt forgiveness argument is strengthened when incentive problems are considered in a multi period context

strategy proof assignment on the full preference domain we consider the problem of efficiently allocating several indivisible objects between agents who are to receive at most one object and whose preferences are private information we examine this standard assignment problem from the perspective of mechanism design giving up the usual assumption of linear preferences and instead using a full preference domain with indifferences permitted we characterize two classes of mechanisms i bi polar serially dictatorial rules by essential single valuedness pareto indifference strategy proofness and non bossiness and ii all selections from bi polar serially dictatorial rules by single valuedness efficiency strategy proofness and weak non bossiness we compare the outcomes from the bi polar serially dictatorial rules with the outcomes obtained using a market based approach namely the core of the market we show that all strongly efficient outcomes in the core can be generated using serially dictatorial rules moreover we argue that serially dictatorial rules have an advantage over the market based approach in that they yield strongly efficient solutions for all preference profiles making it possible to use randomization to restore equity when preferences are private information this type of ex ante equity cannot be implemented using the market based approach

development policy for non grid connected wind power in china an analysis based on institutional change abstract government policy continues to play a crucial role in the development of wind power industry in china the 2005 renewable energy law and related policies have driven the rapid increase in wind power installed capacity in china over the past half decade with capacity doubling annually since 2005 however a large number of wind farms generate electricity well below their installed capacity resulting in considerable wastage of resources non grid connected wind power theory proposes that large scale wind power output does not necessarily have to be fed into the grid but can be used directly in industrial production thus the use of the theory can promote the sustainable development of the wind power industry by obviating the need for power grid in this paper we analyze the influence of government policy on wind power industry from the perspective of institutional change by employing the basic theories of new institutional economics a development model for non grid connected wind power is proposed in order to implement institutional change in accordance with the specific characteristics of wind power industry in china this model requires the government to play an active role in institutional development by increasing economic efficiency in order to promote the sustainable development of wind power

incentive compatibility and competitive allocations abstract it is shown that as the number of individuals in an economy grows the demand functions which are optimal for an agent converge to the competitive price taking demand

matching with couples stability and incentives in large markets accommodating couples has been a longstanding issue in the design of centralized labor market clearinghouses for doctors and psychologists because couples view pairs of jobs as complements a stable matching may not exist when couples are present this paper s main result is that a stable matching exists when there are relatively few couples and preference lists are suciently short relative to market size we also discuss incentives in markets with couples we relate these theoretical results to the job market for psychologists in which stable matchings exist for all years of the data despite the presence of couples

a dynamic school choice model this paper inspires from a real life assignment problem faced by the mexican ministry of public education we introduce a dynamic school choice problem that consists in assigning positions to overlapping generations of teachers from one period to another teachers can either retain their current positions or choose a preferred one in this framework a solution concept that conciliates the fairness criteria with the individual rationality condition is introduced it is then proved that a solution always exists and that it can be reached by a modified version of the deferred acceptance algorithm of gale and shapley we also show that the mechanism is dynamically strategy proof and respects improvements whenever the set of orders is lexicographic by tenure

debt write downs and debt equity swaps in the two sector model abstract debt overhang models have motivated the possibility of pareto improving market based debt reduction schemes through the assumption that creditors can seize debtor output under default these models usually reach the conclusion that both debtor financed debt repurchases and debt equity swaps are not in the interest of debtor nations this paper re examines these conclusions for a debtor nation that also has a safe sector which is unexposed to seizure debt overhangs are then shown to distort the composition of investment in the debtor nation nominal debt reductions mitigate these distortions enhancing the potential for pareto improving debt equity swaps

regional decentralization and fiscal incentives federalism chinese style abstract aligning the interests of local governments with market development is an important issue for developing and transition economies using a panel data set from china we investigate the relationship between provincial government s fiscal incentives and provincial market development we report three empirical findings first we find that during the period of fiscal contracting system the discrepancy between ex ante contracts and ex post implementation was relatively small suggesting that the fiscal contracts were credible second we find a much higher correlation about four times between the provincial government s budgetary revenue and its expenditure during 1980s and 1990s as compared to 1970s demonstrating that provincial governments faced much stronger ex post fiscal incentives after reform third we find that stronger ex ante fiscal incentives measured by the contractual marginal retention rate of the provincial government in its budgetary revenue are associated with faster development of the non state sector as well as more reforms in the state sector in the provincial economy this holds even when we control for the conventional measure of fiscal decentralization finally we compare federalism chinese style to federalism russian style

matching with contracts comment the theory of two sided matching markets has interested researchers for its theoretical appeal and its relevance to the design of real world institutions the medical residency matching mecha nism in the united states the national resident matching program nrmp and student assign ment systems in new york city and boston are important mechanisms designed by economists using the theory 1 hatfield and paul r milgrom 2005 present a unified framework of matching with contracts which includes the two sided matching and package auction models as well as a simplified version of a labor market model of alexander kelso and vincent p crawford 1982 as special cases they introduce the substitutes condition of contracts which is an adaptation of the substitutability condition in the matching literature roth and marilda a oliveira sotomayor 1990 to matching with contracts they show that there exists a stable allocation if contracts are substitutes for hospitals and that a number of other results in matching generalize to problems with contracts they further claim that the substitutes condition on individual hospitals prefer ences is necessary to guarantee the existence of a stable allocation for all possible singleton preferences of others that is if contracts are not substitutes for a hospital then there exists a preference profile of other hospitals with single job openings and doctors such that there exists no stable allocation we show that this last claim of hatfield and milgrom 2005 does not hold in general the counterexample we present involves a hospital which has two different kinds of positions and the preferences of the hospital are a combination of preferences of these two positions while the substitutes condition does not hold for that hospital we adopt a technique developed by bettina klaus and flip klijn 2005 and show that there exists a stable allocation we then present the weak substitutes condition which we show is necessary to guarantee existence of stable allocations the modified result we present as well as the original contribu tion of hatfield and milgrom 2005 suggest a connection between the substitutes condition and stability 2

restricting the means of exchange within organizations abstract this paper considers why firms often ban monetary exchange between their employees while encouraging these trades through other means such as through the reciprocation of favours or barter despite classical inefficiencies associated with non monetary exchange we illustrate two themes as to why non monetary trade may be preferred to allowing money first the use of non monetary trade may affect the allocation of rents in surplus enhancing ways as agents respond strategically to the existence of these rents second non monetary trade improves the ability of agents to impose sanctions on those who act dishonestly

china s wind power industry policy support technological achievements and emerging challenges abstract since 2005 the chinese wind power technology industry has developed rapidly with china becoming the largest installer of wind power capacity in the world in 2010 this paper reviews the policy system implemented in china to support the wind power industry centered on china s 2005 renewable energy law it examines the industry s achievements over the past two decades including the development of wind power technology and equipment the utilization of china s wind power resources and the cost reductions achieved it then explores the obstacles affecting the ongoing sustainability of the chinese wind industry including regulatory barriers grid integration challenges and challenges to continued technological innovation it recommends that integration challenges be addressed through policy reforms establishing interconnection standards and creating predictability with forecasting and storage that market signals be established with long term development goals and pricing reforms and that industry limitations be addressed with targeted r d improved wind resource assessment and transparency domestic and international collaborations and the cultivation of a skilled workforce

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

stability and competitive equilibrium in trading networks we introduce a model in which agents in a network can trade via bilateral contracts we find that when continuous transfers are allowed and utilities are quasi linear the full substitutability of preferences is sufficient to guarantee the existence of stable outcomes for any underlying network structure furthermore the set of stable outcomes is essentially equivalent to the set of competitive equilibria and all stable outcomes are in the core and are efficient by contrast for any domain of preferences strictly larger than that of full substitutability the existence of stable outcomes and competitive equilibria cannot be guaranteed

sovereign debt repurchases no cure for overhang troubled debtor countries do not gain by repurchasing external bank debt at market discount even if a buyback would stimulate investment by relieving debt overhang the reason is that buybacks allow creditors to reap more than 100 percent of any efficiency gains that might result from increased investment we show that open market buybacks provide a benchmark for evaluating more complex negotiated buyback deals by comparing any given deal with a hypothetical market buyback of the same size one can derive upper and lower bounds on the gain to the country we apply our model to the 1990 mexican debt deal

an experimental study on the incentives of the probabilistic serial mechanism we report an experiment on the probabilistic serial ps mechanism for allocating indivisible goods the ps mechanism a recently discovered alternative to the widely used random serial dictatorship mechanism has attractive fairness and efficiency properties if people report their preferences truthfully however the mechanism is not strategy proof so participants may not truthfully report their preferences we investigate misreporting in a set of simple applications of the ps mechanism we confront subjects with situations in which the theory suggests that there is an incentive or no incentive to misreport we find little misreporting in situations where misreporting is a nash equilibrium however we also find a significant degree of misreporting in situations where there is actually no benefit to doing so these findings suggest that the ps mechanism may have problems in terms of truthful elicitation

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

sorting through search and matching models in economics toward understanding assortative matching this is a self contained introduction to research on search and matching we first explore the nontransferable and perfectly transferable utility matching paradigms and then a unifying imperfectly transferable utility matching model motivated by some unrealistic predictions of frictionless matching we flesh out the foundational economics of search theory we then revisit the original matching paradigms with search frictions we finally allow informational frictions that often arise such as in college student sorting

between fragmented authoritarianism and policy coordination creating a chinese market for wind energy abstract the chinese grid connected wind energy sector has undergone a number of fundamental changes during its 20 years of existence the scope of this article is to track the reforms of the energy bureaucracy and its policy approach on the one hand and changes in wind energy installations on the other by comparing three historically distinct phases of wind energy in china it is shown how policy reforms have changed largely from a state of fragmented authoritarianism towards policy coordination in the initial phase 1986 1993 wind energy was expanding very slowly with disjointed policy making and in the incremental phase 1994 1999 the energy authorities were in dispute over the strategy and launched conflicting policy initiatives with poor results in wind energy output the latest coordinated phase 2000 2006 however developed a coherent renewable energy agenda and policy regime for the wind power sector it is found that this phase with coordinated market regulations and incentives has helped give birth to a take off in chinese wind energy installations and substantial cost reductions although the latter is threatening the profitability of wind farms the article contributes to the academic debate over the role of policy making in renewable energy development and argues that china should continue and improve the coordination of regulations and incentives

china s renewable energy law and its impact on renewable power in china progress challenges and recommendations for improving implementation beginning in 2006 china experienced a rapid growth in its renewable energy resources particularly wind power placing it among the world s leading countries in terms of renewable energy installation and generation this growth was greatly enabled by the renewable energy policy framework created by its landmark renewable energy law passed in 2005 and amended in 2009 which established key policies including national renewable energy targets a mandatory connection and purchase policy a national feed in tariff system and arrangements for cost sharing and funding of renewable energy incentives this paper describes the mechanisms established by the renewable energy law and its implementing regulations as well as the challenges china continues to face in improving its renewable energy policy framework to improve integration and utilization of renewable energy sources it also provides a comparison of the chinese renewable energy policy framework with those in the european union and united states finally the paper provides recommendations for improving implementation of the renewable energy law with regard to implementing a renewable power quota system and priority dispatch policy developing technical standards for connection of renewable resources with the grid development of a more advanced feed in tariff system and central local coordination of renewable energy development

why do popular mechanisms lack efficiency in random environments we consider the problem of randomly assigning n indivisible objects to n agents recent research introduced a promising mechanism the probabilistic serial that has superior e ciency properties than the most common real life mechanism random priority on the other hand mechanisms based on gale s celebrated top trading cycles method have long dominated the indivisible goods literature with the exception of the present context thanks to their outstanding e ciency features we present an equivalence

did government decentralization cause china s economic miracle many scholars attribute china s market reforms and the remarkable economic performance they have fostered in part to the country s political and fiscal decentralization political decentralization is said to have stimulated local policy experiments and restrained predatory central interventions fiscal decentralization is thought to have motivated local officials to promote development and harden enterprises budget constraints the locally diversified structure of the prereform economy is said to have facilitated liberalization reexamining these arguments the authors find that none establishes a convincing link between political or fiscal decentralization and china s successes they suggest an alternative view of the reform process in which growth enhancing policies emerged from competition between promarket and conservative factions in beijing

designing random allocation mechanisms theory and applications randomization is commonplace in everyday resource allocation we generalize the theory of randomized assignment to accommodate multi unit allocations and various real world constraints such as group specific quotas controlled choice in school choice and house allocation and scheduling and curriculum constraints in course allocation we develop new mechanisms that are ex ante efficient and fair in these environments and that incorporate certain non additive substitutable preferences we also develop a utility guarantee technique that limits ex post unfairness in random allocations supplementing the ex ante fairness promoted by randomization this can be applied to multi unit assignment problems and certain two sided matching problems jel c78 d82

comparing school choice mechanisms by interim and ex ante welfare recent work has highlighted welfare gains from the use of the boston mechanism over deferred acceptance da in school choice problems in particular finding that when cardinal utility is taken into account boston interim pareto dominates da in certain incomplete information environments with no school priorities we show that these previous interim results are not robust to the introduction of weak priorities however we partially restore the earlier results by showing that from an ex ante utility perspective the boston mechanism pareto dominates any strategyproof mechanism including da even allowing for arbitrary priority structures thus we suggest ex ante pareto dominance as a relevant criterion by which to compare school choice mechanisms this criterion may be of particular interest to school districts as they can be thought of as social planners whose goal is to maximize the overall ex ante welfare of the students

dictators and their viziers endogenizing the loyalty competence trade off the possibility of treason by a close associate has been a nightmare of most autocrats throughout history more competent viziers are better able to discriminate among potential plotters and this makes them more risky subordinates for the ruler to avoid this rulers especially those who are weakandvulnerable sacrificethecompetenceoftheiragents hiringmediocrebutloyalsubordinates furthermore any use of incentive schemes by a personalistic dictator is limited by the fact that all punishments are conditional on the dictator s own survival we endogenize loyalty and competence in a principal agent game between a dictator and his viziers in both static and dynamic settings the dynamic model allows us to focus on the succession problem that insecure dictators face jel d72 h00 c72 c82

unilateral substitutability implies substitutable completability in many to one matching with contracts abstract we prove that the unilateral substitutability property introduced in hatfield and kojima 2010 implies the substitutable completability property from hatfield and kominers 2014 this paper provides a novel linkage between these two sufficient conditions for the existence of a stable matching in many to one matching markets with contracts a substitutable completion of a preference is a substitutable preference created by adding some sets of contracts to the original preference order we provide an algorithm which when operated on the unilaterally substitutable preferences produces such a substitutable completion thus it provides a constructive proof of the connection between the two properties

group strategyproof cost sharing the role of indifferences every agent reports his willingness to pay for one unit of a good a mechanism allocates goods and cost shares to some agents we characterize the group strategyproof gsp mechanisms under two alternative continuity conditions interpreted as tie breaking rules with the maximalist rule max an indifferent agent is always served with the minimalist rule min an indifferent agent does not get a unit of the good gsp and max characterize the cross monotonic mechanisms these mechanisms are appropriate whenever symmetry is required on the other hand gsp and min characterize the sequential mechanisms these mechanisms are appropriate whenever there is scarcity of the good our results are independent of an underlying cost function they unify and strengthen earlier results for particular classes of cost functions

group strategy proofness in private good economies many salient rules to allocate private goods are not only strategyproof but also group strategy proof in appropriate domains of definition hence diminishing the traditional conflict between incentives and efficiency that is so for solutions to matching division cost sharing house allocation and auctions in spite of the substantive disparity between these cases in a general framework encompassing all of them we prove that the equivalence between the two forms of strategy proofness is due to an underlying common structure that transcends the many differences between the contexts and the mechanisms for which it holds jel c78 d44 d63 d71 d82

a note on job matching with budget constraints abstract recent papers have obtained results for two sided matching games in which agents may have complex preferences this note observes that these results depend on the assumption that firms do not face budget constraints

framing energy efficiency and renewable energy policies an international comparison between mexico and china abstract this essay compares national strategies on mitigation of ghg emissions for mexico and china this state centered analysis stresses the importance of the interaction between international commitments the disposition of internal interest of economy wide actors and the legacies of policy making and institutions particularly in relation to economic development and central local government relations this research does not attempt to classify institutions according to their effectives to foster climate change policies but rather explores specific circumstances for climate change policy making on developing countries contrary to international proposal to find a generic optimal policy choice the research explored the relevance of certain political and economic institutions that can be present in other national cases it shows that the legacies on liberalization and state retreat undermine the state ability to effectively engage with the economic actors on decisions and management likewise regular engagement with them undermines the state affinity towards pursuing economic efficient solutions the relevance of adequate system of incentives for local government to engage in an agenda that is by nature adopted by the central government

matching with contracts we develop a model of matching with contracts which incorporates as special cases the college admissions problem the kelso crawford labor market matching model and ascending package auctions we introduce a new law of aggregate demand for the case of discrete heterogeneous workers and show that when workers are substitutes this law is satisfied by profit maximizing firms when workers are substitutes and the law is satisfied truthful reporting is a dominant strategy for workers in a worker offering auction matching algorithm we also parameterize a large class of preferences satisfying the two conditions

the combinatorial assignment problem approximate competitive equilibrium from equal incomes this paper proposes a new mechanism for combinatorial assignment for example assigning schedules of courses to students based on an approximation to competitive equilibrium from equal incomes ceei in which incomes are unequal but arbitrarily close together the main technical result is an existence theorem for approximate ceei the mechanism is approximately efficient satisfies two new criteria of outcome fairness and is strategyproof in large markets its performance is explored on real data and it is compared to alternatives from theory and practice all other known mechanisms are either unfair ex post or manipulable even in large markets and most are both manipulable and unfair

on the operation of multiple matching markets abstract we provide a new perspective on how to operate matching markets when there are many types of markets our finding is that the market wise adaptation of strategy proof and non wasteful rules yields a strategy proof rule with the following efficiency property no strategy proof rule pareto dominates the rule such rules are abundant as they include the market wise use of the well known priority based rules of the top trading cycles and the deferred acceptance this result gives theoretical support to the independent operation of markets observed in real life markets as well as our practice in market design that separately treats each market for its design

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

matching and price competition we develop a model in which firms set impersonal salary levels before matching with workers wages fall relative to any competitive equilibrium while profits rise almost as much implying little inefficiency furthermore the best firms gain the most from the system while wages become compressed in light of our results we discuss the performance of alternative institutions and the recent antitrust case against the national resident matching program

matching with branch of choice contracts at the united states military academy branch selection is a key decision in a cadet s military career cadets at usma can increase their branch priorities at a fraction of slots by extending their service agreement this real life matching problem lls an important gap in market design literature although priorities fail a key substitutes condition the agent optimal stable mechanism is well dened and in contrast to the current usma mechanism it is fair stable and strategy proof adoption of this mechanism benets cadets and the army this new

incentives in the probabilistic serial mechanism abstract the probabilistic serial mechanism bogomolnaia and moulin 2001 9 is ordinally efficient but not strategy proof we study incentives in the probabilistic serial mechanism for large assignment problems we establish that for a fixed set of object types and an agent with a given expected utility function if there are sufficiently many copies of each object type then reporting ordinal preferences truthfully is a weakly dominant strategy for the agent regardless of the number of other agents and their preferences the non manipulability and the ordinal efficiency of the probabilistic serial mechanism support its implementation instead of random serial dictatorship in large assignment problems

strategy proof stochastic assignment abstract i study strategy proof assignment mechanisms where the agents reveal their preference rankings over the available objects a stochastic mechanism returns lotteries over deterministic assignments and mechanisms are compared according to first order stochastic dominance i show that non wasteful strategy proof mechanisms are not dominated by strategy proof mechanisms however non wastefulness is highly restrictive when the mechanism involves randomization in fact the random priority mechanism i e the random serial dictatorship and a recently adopted school choice mechanism deferred acceptance with random tie breaking are wasteful i find that both these mechanisms are dominated by strategy proof mechanisms in general strategy proof improvement cannot be due to merely reshuffling objects and therefore must involve assigning more objects

political and institutional analysis of the successes and failures of china s wind power policy this paper identifies and explains how political and institutional factors have determined the relative successes and failures of china s wind power policy over the period 2005 2011 it finds that china has made significant progress in pursuing its wind power policy in terms of cumulative installed capacity wind turbine manufacturing industry development and wind turbine cost and argues that these achievements can be attributed to the political motives and institutional arrangements of the chinese government as well as to institutional changes on the other hand the paper finds that there are two prominent policy failures namely the low proportion of grid connected capacity and the rising trend of wind turbine incidents these have undermined the efficiency and effectiveness of china s wind power program the paper holds that the institutional sources for the first policy failure lies in the preference for setting wind power development targets in terms of installed capacity rather than generation and in coordination problems while the second policy failure lies in the lack of state technical codes for wind power integration and the unfair competition from the large state owned power companies the paper contributes to the academic literature on the political and institutional roles in china s wind power policy

debt buybacks debt reduction and debt rescheduling under asymmetric information in the early nineties there was a significant recovery of many debtridden economies after the shift in debt policy implicit in the socalled brady plan yet the use of scarce resources from debtor countries to buy back part of their debts remains a controversial feature of this plan we use a multiperiod model of debt overhang to show that under asymmetric information this transfer of resources emerges naturally as part of the shift from a strategy of debt rescheduling to one of debt reduction after nearly a decade of suffering from debt ridden economies in the early nineties many countries with large external debts finally reduced their debt service ratios regained access to spontaneous private financing and achieved higher growth and lower inflation imf 1993 many analysts have since attributed at least part of this success to the shift in the international debt strategy in 1989 which took a new direction with the so called brady initiative l a rather controversial feature of this initiative was the use of scarce resources from the debtor countries to buy back part of their debt there are two reasons why this use of a country s resources seems unwise first capital has more value in the debtor country than abroad thus transferring additional current resources from the country to its creditors at fair prices would appear to be welfare reducing second contrary to the idea that by repurchasing its debt in the open market a debtor country benefits from the discount price bulow and rogoff 1988 1991 prove under assumptions that include symmetric information that these buybacks hurt the country since the purchase price2 incorporates and transfers to the seller all the benefits caused by a reduced debt 3

strategy proofness and stability of the boston mechanism an almost impossibility result abstract public school systems generally use one of the three competing mechanisms the boston mechanism the deferred acceptance mechanism and the top trading cycle mechanism for assigning students to specific schools although the literature generally claims that the boston mechanism is pareto efficient but neither stable nor strategy proof this study delineates a subset of school priority structures for which it fulfills all three criteria we show that the boston mechanism is stable if and only if it is strategy proof if and only if the priority structure is strongly acyclic however we find that the condition of strong acyclicity is nearly impossible to satisfy any priority structure is quasi cyclic whenever there are two schools whose admission quotas are less than the number of students seeking admission

matching and price competition comment the theory of two sided matching markets has interested researchers for its theoretical appeal and relevance to real life applications the matching of medical residents and hospitals in the united states has been studied extensively by alvin e roth 1984 and others the national resident matching program nrmp the matching authority in the us hospital resident matching market runs a centralized matching mechanism that is a variant of the deferred acceptance algorithm of david gale and lloyd s shapley 1962 redesigned by roth and elliott peranson 1999 a recent antitrust case against the nrmp charged that the centralized matching mechanism suppressed wages of residents although the lawsuit itself was dismissed it sparked discussion about the effect of centralized matching on wages and efficiency jeremy bulow and jonathan levin 2006 bl henceforth investigate a matching market with price competition where each firm can hire only one worker and show that a the average wage is lower b profit of each firm is higher c wages are more compressed and d the resulting matching is slightly less efficient in the presence of the matching mechanism than in any competitive equilibrium although bl declare we have chosen our assumptions for analytical simplicity and transparency not as the most realistic possible model of the residency match 654 these results were often interpreted as an argument against the nrmp and led to discussion about potential changes of the matching mechanism vincent p crawford forthcoming for instance proposes the flexible salary match in which hospitals are allowed to indicate several levels of possible wages and medical students are allowed to express preferences over pairs of hospitals and wages we show that conclusions a and b above do not necessarily hold when firms may hire more than one worker and the number of workers in different firms are different more specifically we present an example with multiple positions in which the average worker wage is higher in the equilibrium with the matching mechanism than in a competitive equilibrium and profit of each firm is lower in the equilibrium with the matching mechanism than in a competitive equilibrium our findings may explain why some of the results of bl disagree with empirical findings of muriel niederle and roth 2003 2004 who find little or no effect of the centralized matching on wages in some medical matching markets in the united states note that different firms hire different numbers of workers in many labor markets like the nrmp there are other reasons why the conclusions and policy implications of bl may not be applicable to markets like the nrmp for example a competitive equilibrium may not be a

top trading with fixed tie breaking in markets with indivisible goods abstract we study markets with indivisible goods where monetary compensations are not possible each individual is endowed with an object and a preference relation over all objects when preferences are strict gale s top trading cycles algorithm finds the unique core allocation when preferences are not necessarily strict we use an exogenous profile of tie breakers to resolve any ties in individuals preferences and apply gale s top trading cycles algorithm for the resulting profile of strict preferences we provide a foundation of these simple extensions of gale s top trading cycles algorithm from strict preferences to weak preferences we show that gale s top trading cycles algorithm with fixed tie breaking is characterized by individual rationality strategy proofness weak efficiency non bossiness and consistency our result supports the common practice in applications to break ties in weak preferences using some fixed exogenous criteria and then to use a good and simple rule for the resulting strict preferences

to what extent does wind power deployment affect vested interests a case study of the northeast china grid abstract china s wind power is in an embarrassing state along with its dramatic development since 2005 its curtailment ratio has been rising although this could be attributed to both physical and institutional factors it is the institutional obstacles mainly resulting from the adjustment difficulties of interests distribution that have exercised a greater impact the stakeholders relating to wind power integration are thermal power companies grid companies and local governments the extent to which wind power deployment affects these vested interests determines the core institutional obstacles to be addressed mainly based on quantitative and case analyses we argue that currently wind deployment in china has a little impact on the interests of thermal companies moderate impact on the interests of grid companies and great impact on local governments we recommend that it is crucial to elevate the role of environmental protection and renewable energy increase while de emphasize the role of economic growth in the evaluation of local governments performance as well as provide incentives for grid companies to attend more to their social responsibilities rather than their scale expansion and revenue growth

relaxing the substitutes condition in matching markets with contracts in the many to one matching model with contracts i provide new necessary and new sufficient conditions for the existence of a stable allocation these new conditions exploit the fact that one side of the market has strict preferences over individual contracts

efficiency of large double auctions we consider large double auctions with private values values need be neither symmetric nor independent multiple units may be owned or desired participation may be stochastic we introduce a very mild notion of a little independence we prove that all nontrivial equilibria of auctions that satisfy this notion are asymptotically efficient for any alpha 0 inefficiency disappears at rate 1 n 2 alpha

resolving conflicting preferences in school choice the boston mechanism reconsidered the boston mechanism is among the most popular school choice pro cedures in use yet the mechanism has been criticized for its poor incentive and welfare performances which led the boston public schools to recently replace it with gale and shapley s deferred acceptance algorithm henceforth da the da elicits truthful revelation of ordinal preferences whereas the boston mechanism does not but the latter induces participants to reveal their cardinal preferences i e their relative preference intensities whereas the former does not we show that cardinal preferences matter more when families have similar ordinal preferences and schools have coarse priorities two common features of many school choice environ ments speci cally when students have the same ordinal preferences and schools have no priorities the boston mechanism pareto dominates the da in ex ante wel fare the boston mechanism may not harm but rather bene t participants who may not strategize well in the presence of school priorities the boston mechanism also tends to facilitate a greater access than the da to good schools by those lack ing priorities at those schools these results contrast with the standard view and cautions against a hasty rejection of the boston mechanism in favor of mechanisms such as the da

equilibria and indivisibilities gross substitutes and complements this paper examines an exchange economy with heterogeneous indivisible objects that can be substitutable or complementary we show that a competitive equilibrium exists in such economies provided that all the objects can be partitioned into two groups and from the viewpoint of each agent objects in the same group are substitutes and objects across the two groups are complements this condition generalizes the well known kelso crawford gross substitutes condition and is called gross substitutes and complements we also provide practical and typical examples from which substitutes and complements are both jointly observed

cumulative offer process is order independent this note shows that in the matching with contracts model the outcome of the cumulative offer process is order independent if every hospital has a choice function that satisfies the bilateral substitutability condition and the irrelevance of rejected contracts condition

federalism chinese style the political basis for economic success in china china s remarkable economic success rests on a foundation of political reform providing a considerable degree of credible commitment to markets this reform reflects a special type of institutionalized decentralization that the authors call federalism chinese style this form of decentralization has three consequences first it fosters competition not only in product markets but also among local governments for labor and foreign capital this competition in turn encourages local government experimentation and learning with new forms of enterprises regulation and economic relationships second it provides incentives for local governments to promote local economic prosperity finally it provides a significant amount of protection to local governments and their enterprises from political intrusion by the central government

the rate at which a simple market converges to efficiency as the number of traders increases an asymptotic result for optimal trading mechanisms private information in an independent private values market provides incentives to traders to manipulate equilibrium prices strategically this strategic behavior precludes ex post efficient market performance increasing the number of traders improves the efficiency of some trading mechanisms by enabling them to better utilize the private information traders bids and offers reveal this paper shows that the expected inefficiency of optimally designed mechanisms relative to ex post efficient allocations decreases almost quadratically as the number of traders increases

fair allocation of indivisible goods and criteria of justice a set of n objects and an amount m of money is to be distributed among m people example the objects are tasks and the money is compensation from a fixed budget an elementary argument via constrained optimization shows that for m sufficiently large the set of efficient envy free allocations is nonempty and has a nice structure in particular various criteria of justice lead to unique best fair allocations that are well behaved with respect to changes of m this is in sharp contrast to the usual fair division theory with divisible goods

bidding for army career specialties improving the rotc branching mechanism motivated by the low retention rates of us military academy and reserve officer training corps graduates the army recently introduced incentives programs in which cadets could bid 3 years of additional service obligation to obtain higher priority for their desired branches the full potential of this incentives program is not utilized because of the rotc s deficient matching mechanism i propose a design that eliminates these shortcomings and mitigates several policy problems the army has identified in contrast to the rotc mechanism my design utilizes market principles more extensively and it is a hybrid between a market mechanism and a priority based allocation mechanism