stochastic olg models market structure and optimality for a general class of pure exchange olg economies under uncertainty we provide a complete characterization of the efficency properties of competitive equilibria when markets are only sequentially complete and the criterion of efficency is conditional pareto optimality we also consider a particular case in which markets fail to be even sequentially complete and provide a characterization when the criterion of efficency is weakened to ex post pareto optimality

continuous and feasible implementation of rational expectations lindahl allocations abstract in this paper we consider bayesian implementation of rational expectations lindahl allocations for economic environments with public goods when agents are incompletely informed about environments we construct a continuous and feasible mechanism whose bayesian equilibrium allocations coincide with rational expectations lindahl allocations we not only allow the types of individuals to be unknown but also allow both the preferences and the initial endowments to be unknown to the designer in addition we allow some types of boundary equilibrium allocations and a continuous information structure journal of economic literatureclassification number c72 d71 d82 h41

a graphical exposition of the economic theory of regulation i introduction historically many if not most economic theories have advanced in three fairly distinct stages progressing from descriptive to graphical to mathematical formulations generally in that sequence the economic theory of regulation however has been an exception to this normal order of progression the fundamental corpus of this theory was laid out initially in the descriptive discussions provided by stigler 1971 posner 1974 and others from these early presentations however the theory was subsequently formalized mathematically by peltzman 1976 and becker 1983 without passing through the graphical stage of its development 1 regardless of the chronological order of the progression of this theory however we believe that a fully developed graphical exposition is likely to be of considerable value even now at least two considerations support this view specifically by making this theory more accessible to a wider audience and by better illustrating the basic underlying mechanics behind it the likelihood of significant future advancement we believe is enhanced indeed currently there remain a number of observed regulatory phenomena that have yet to be satisfactorily explained by the existing theory e g the deregulation movement and the specific pattern of observed cross subsidies 2 an improved understanding of the fundamental components of the theory should facilitate its further advancement and lead to an expanded ability to explain a broader range of regulatory practices we illustrate this point through a variety of applications to provide an improved understanding of inter alia the markets likely to be chosen for regulation the propensity of regulatory benefits to be spread across interest groups the symbiotic nature of regulation and cross subsidization and the economics of deregulation we also are able to depict graphically the relationship between the economic theory of regulation and the traditional normative model of regulation which assumes that regulators maximize social welfare the article is organized as follows in section ii we briefly describe the regulator s general optimization problem viz what precisely is being maximized and what constraints apply to that maximization problem the latter topic the constraints will be of primary interest here section iii presents the formal graphical analysis of these constraints by deriving what we label the regulator s benefits budget constraint as its name suggests the benefits budget constraint defines the locus of maximum benefits the regulator is able to deliver to the affected interest groups importantly that constraint is determined by the prior unregulated market equilibrium price and output and by general market parameters such as demand elasticity costs and so on section iv describes the resulting regulatory equilibrium section v then applies the graphical tools developed in sections ii iv to explain a number of commonly observed regulatory phenomena here both the ability to provide new insights and the pedagogical value of the graphical approach are illustrated finally section vi concludes ii the regulator s general optimization problem the economic theory of regulation postulates that regulators will attempt to maximize some objective function most generally the regulator s utility by implementing regulatory policies that benefit and by necessity harm particular interest groups 3 the benefits provided to these groups are then used to purchase from them the objects that are directly valued by the regulator that is the direct arguments contained in the regulator s objective function the distribution of these benefits and harms across the affected groups which is determined by the regulator s choice of a particular regulatory policy is selected to maximize the value of the regulator s objective function the ability of any specific interest group to curry regulatory favor then will depend on the capacity of that group to deliver the objects of value to the regulator in exchange for the benefits provided by the regulatory process

market specific effects of rail deregulation since partial deregulation of the railroad industry in 1980 real rail rates have fallen yet previous studies are inconclusive in identifying deregulation as the reason for lower rates in this paper the author develops a model that tests a variety of deregulation effects on the rates charged for transporting thirty four different commodities the results suggest that deregulation has significantly affected almost all commodities and that the effects vary by commodity and through time initially deregulation increased rates for some commodities had no effect on others and decreased rates on still others however by 1988 deregulation lowered rates significantly for almost all commodities copyright 1994 by blackwell publishing ltd

nash implementation using undominated strategies we study the problem of implementing social choice correspondences using the concept of undominated nash equilibrium i e nash equilibrium in which no one uses a weakly dominated strategy we show that this mild refinement of nash equilibrium has a dramatic impact on the set of implementable correspondences our main result is that if there are at least three agents in the society then any correspondence which satisfies the usual no veto power condition is implementable unless some agents are completely indifferent over all possible outcomes many common welfare criteria such as the pareto correspondence and several familiar voting rules such as majority and plurality rules satisfy our conditions this possibility result stands in sharp contrast to the more restrictive findings with implementation in either nash equilibrium or subgame perfect equilibrium we present several examples to illustrate the difference between undominated nash implementation and implementation with alternative solution concepts

optimality in stochastic olg models theory for tests we consider general olg economies under uncertainty with short maturity assets and with dividend paying assets of infinite maturity and fiat money and study the optimality properties of equilibria with a sequence of asset markets that are sequentially complete we provide necessary and sufficient conditions in terms of asset prices and dividends for equilibria to be conditionally pareto optimal these results provide a theoretical basis for empirical investigation

the cass criterion the net dividend criterion and optimality abstract abel mankiw summers and zeckhauser assessing dynamic efficiency theory and evidence rev econ stud 56 1989 1 20 propose the net dividend criterion as an easy to use sufficient condition for optimality in general stochastic overlapping generations economies with production we provide examples based on the criterion due to cass on capital overaccumulation in the aggregative neoclassical model of economic growth a complete characterization j econ theory 4 1972 200 223 and its extensions the usual tools for such problems to show that the net dividend criterion need not give the right answer we identify the flaw in their proof we also provide an alternative condition which by an argument unrelated to theirs is a sufficient condition for optimality when dividends are nonnegative and then argue that the condition is not innocuous since it cannot be verified in actual economies

is the general public licence a rational choice open source projects are networks of developers distributors and end users of non proprietary created knowledge goods it has been argued that this form of organization has some advantages over the firm or market coordination i show that for sufficiently convex and modular projects proprietary licences are not able to sustain sequential knowledge production which however can be carried out if the project is run on the open source basis

bureaucratic discretion or congressional control regulatory policymaking by the federal trade commission this paper extends stigler and peltzman s approach to regulation by incorporating a legislature the model yields comparative statics results and hence testable implications the paper then tests between two opposing approaches about regulatory agency behavior the first assumes agencies operate independently of the legislature and hence exercise discretion the second assumes that congress controls agency decisions the recent behavior of the federal trade commission provides the empirical setting substantial evidence is found for the specific predictions of the model including the hypothesis of systematic congressional influence over ftc decisions

on renegotiation design a central concern of contract theory is to investigate departures from the first best paradigm in which rational agents could in principle achieve unrestrained efficiency through complete long term contingent contracts in order to take into account some of the observed limitations in real life contracts attention has been paid to informational problems one focus has been on asymmetries of information between contractors adverse selection and moral hazard have been used for example to analyze insurance problems labor contracts managerial incentives regulation of monopolies vertical restraints or the financial structure of firms see for example hartholmstrom 1987 for a survey of these issues attention has also been devoted to private information shared by the parties but unavailable to outsiders like courts that is observable but unverifiable information asymmetries of information between contractors introduce constraints which indeed most often prevent to achieve first best efficiency unfortunately this paradigm involves technical difficulties which explains why most contributions focus on unidimensional asymmetries and may leave some undeterminacies as to the form of optimal contracts e g if there are more than one asymmetry or the size of the inetliciencies there may for instance exist several equilibria which are more or less inefficient the last paradigm observable but unverifiable information is technically more convenient what is not clear however is the extent to which the presence of unverifiable information may prevent achieving first best

unique implementation of incentive contracts with many agents in this paper we consider the problem of implementation when a principal hires many agents and is not able to monitor their actions we distinguish two cases i when actions are mutually observable among agents ii when actions are not observable at all in i there is a mechanism in which the first best arises as a unique perfect equilibrium in ii we show by two examples that typically there are multiple equilibria if the principal merely offers a set of optimal sharing rules however we prove that the principal can use these optimal sharing rules as a starting point and construct a multi stage mechanism that has a unique second best perfect bayesian equilibrium

the externalities problem of transboundary and persistent pollution abstract this paper deals with implementing the efficient allocation of transboundary and persistent pollution in particular we adapt varian s compensation mechanism varian a solution to the problem of externalities when agents are well informed amer econ rev 85 1994 1278 1293 to cover situations in which pollutants extend to neighboring regions and their effects persist over time the main contribution of this paper is the design of a mechanism that implements in subgame perfect equilibrium the efficient pollution levels in this context

implementation of bargaining sets via simple mechanisms abstract we propose two simple mechanisms that implement two bargaining sets in super additive environments the first bargaining set is a close variation of the one proposed by l zhou 1994 games econom behav 6 512 526 and the second is the pareto optimum payoffs of the a mas colell 1989 j math econom 18 129 139 bargaining set we adopt a simple framework in which the cooperative outcomes are realized as non cooperative subgame perfect equilibria in pure strategies of a two stage game played by an auxiliary set of individuals competing over the cooperative agents journal of economic literature classification numbers c71 c72

demand pricing and regulation evidence from the cable tv industry subsequent to the nationwide deregulation of the cable tv industry a number of questions have been raised concerning the conduct of cable firms answers to these questions turn upon a fundamental set of issues regarding the economic relationships of demand pricing and regulation in this article we empirically examine these relationships for the period prior to deregulation a number of basic findings emerge among these we find that the demand for basic cable service ranges from being generally inelastic in rural areas to elastic in large urban markets the elasticity of demand for pay cable services is typically well in excess of unity also while regulation did not lead to economically efficient marginal cost prices for basic cable service it did act to keep prices below monopoly levels moreover our examination reveals some significant differences in the effectiveness of the various types of regulation practiced in the pre deregulation period

incentives between firms and within this paper reviews the significant progress in agency theory i e the economic theory of incentives during the 1990s with an eye toward applications to supply transactions i emphasize six recent models in three pairs 1 new foundations for the theory of incentive contracts 2 new directions in incentive theory and 3 new applications to supply transactions by reviewing these six models i hope to establish three things first the theory of incentive contracts needed and received new foundations second new directions in incentive theory teach us that incentive contracts are not the only source of incentives finally and especially relevant to supply transactions the integration decision is an instrument in the incentive problem

the disinterest in deregulation in the analysis of the costs of monopoly power the usual experiment is to convert a competitive industry into a monopoly and observe the consequent change in consumer s surplus modern contributions have emphasized the deadweight cost of monopoly arnold harberger 1954 and the possibility of an associated rent seeking cost of monopoly gordon tullock 1967 the harberger cost of course refers to the lost consumer s surplus triangle the tullock cost concerns the role of competition for monopoly returns taken together and assuming that the competition for monopoly rents is perfect the total cost of monopoly power is a trapezoid the rectangle of monopoly profits plus the triangle of lost consumer s surplus richard posner 1975 in this paper we approach the monopoly problem in a different spirit we compare three states of the world competition regulation and deregulation in this setting we ask what happens if a monopoly is eliminated through deregulation our analysis suggests that because under most conditions tullock costs cannot be recouped the returns to deregulation are lower than previously thought rent seeking expenditures in the past leave the economy permanently poorer even if competition is restored to the industry in contrast the returns to preventing monopoly in the first place are relatively high in our model an insight afforded by the analysis is an explanation of the persistence of laws and regulations which appear to serve no interest in this regard the example of railroad regulation in the united states comes to mind the standard explanation for such regulation is either that voters and government decision makers are ignorant of basic economics or that a small interest group like railroad firms wins rents at the expense of uninformed or economically rational consumers of rail services who do not find it cost effective to seek deregulation we offer another and perhaps more plausible explanation for the persistence of regulation and the apathy of consumers about the costs of regulation namely the costs of such regulations are for the most part the original rent seeking expenditures that lead to the regulation in the first place and these costs are sunk abolishing so called uneconomic laws does nothing to recover these losses hence there is little political support from any quarter to return to the status quo ante in fact as we shall show such a deregulatory program can easily impose more costs than it is worth there are numerous examples of this point including tariffs and quotas of all sorts subsidies to farmers the postal monopoly organized labor s antitrust exemption the licensing of doctors and so forth the traditional explanations of these monopoly rights namely ignorance of economic common sense and special interest groups are neither sufficient nor necessary since the primary costs of these laws are rent seeking expenditures which are made prior to their passage there is simply little to be gained by changing them now gains would accrue in the form of reduced harberger costs costs would be borne in passing and implementing the deregulatory program it is not that the potential gainers from deregulation are large in number diffuse heterogeneous and face high organizational costs rather they do not exist to any degree interpreted in this light efforts by political action groups such as the right to work foundation stand to be a drain on society s resources they cannot produce anything unless they prevent further monopolization through regulation we do not of course mccormick and shughart clemson university clemson sc 29631 tollison center for the study of public choice george mason university fairfax va 22030 thanks go to james buchanan rex cottle and gordon tullock for helpful comments the usual caveat applies

on ascending vickrey auctions for heterogeneous objects abstract we construct an ascending auction for heterogeneous objects by applying a primal dual algorithm to a linear program that represents the efficient allocation problem for this setting the auction assigns personalized prices to bundles and asks bidders to report their preferred bundles in each round a bidder s prices are increased when he belongs to a minimally undersupplied set of bidders this concept generalizes the notion of overdemanded sets of objects introduced by demange gale and sotomayor for the one to one assignment problem under a submodularity condition the auction implements the vickrey clarke groves outcome we show that this type of condition is somewhat necessary to do so when classifying the ascending auction literature in terms of their underlying algorithms our auction fills a gap in that literature we relate our results to various ascending auctions in the literature

incomplete contracting and price regulation abstract this paper deals with price regulation of a monopolistic distribution grid which sells a license to some retailer the regulator aims at attaining efficient sale of the license and efficient relationship specific investments of the agents the first best can be attained by a sequential regulatory mechanism which gives the seller an option to grant the license but allows the buyer to make counteroffers this sequential mechanism runs counter to the usual price cap idea since possible upward but never downward renegotiation of the regulated prices is the vehicle to attain the first best

efficient investments in the implementation problem abstract this paper identifies a condition for an efficient social choice rule to be fully implementable when we take into account investment efficiency to do so we extend the standard implementation problem to include endogenous ex ante and ex post investments in our problem the social planner aims to achieve efficiency in every equilibrium of a dynamic game in which agents strategically make investments before and after playing the mechanism our main theorem shows that a novel condition commitment proofness is sufficient and necessary for an efficient social choice rule to be implementable in subgame perfect equilibria the availability of ex post investments is crucial in our model there is no social choice rule that is efficient and implementable in subgame perfect equilibria without ex post investments we also show that our positive result continues to hold in the incomplete information setting

complexity and renegotiation a foundation for incomplete contracts the paper considers a hold up model where only one of n future trading opportunities will prove to be efficient and where ex post renegotiation of the ex ante contract cannot be prevented as the environment becomes more complex n the outcome under any message contingent long term contract converges to that of the incomplete contracting model where trade is contractible ex post but not ex ante when trades are costly to describe both ex ante and ex post the incomplete contracting result is extended to a broader class of environments

a natural mechanism to choose the deserving winner when the jury is made up of all contestants abstract we analyze the problem of a jury choosing the winner from a set of agents when the identity of the deserving winner is common knowledge amongst the jurors but each juror is biased in favor of one different agent we propose a simple and natural mechanism that implements the socially optimal rule the winner is the deserving winner in subgame perfect equilibria

rational asset pricing bubbles this paper provides a fairly systematic study of general economic conditions under which rational asset pricing bubbles may arise in an intertemporal competitive equilibrium framework our main results are concerned with nonexistence of asset pricing bubbles in those economies these results imply that the conditions under which bubbles are possible including some well known examples of monetary equilibria are relatively fragile this paper is concerned with the conditions under which asset prices in an intertemporal competitive equilibrium are equal to the present value of the streams of future dividends to which each asset represents a claim according to a central result of the theory of finance this is very generally true in the case of economies with trading at only a finite sequence of dates as long as there are no restrictions upon transactions other than that associated with possible incom pleteness of the set of securities that are traded the result is sometimes called the fundamental theorem of asset pricing here we consider the extent to which such a result continues to be valid in the case of trading over an infinite horizon it has often been observed in the econometric literature on asset pricing bubbles that it is possible in principle for the price of a perpetuity and the dividends on that security to satisfy at all times a present value relation for one period holding returns while the security s price nonetheless does not equal the present value of the stream of dividends expected over the infinite future in such a case the price of the perpetuity is said to involve a bubble component 2 joint stochastic processes for which this component is nonzero are sometimes argued to characterize existing assets for a recent example see froot and obstfeld 1991 but such an inference depends upon aspects of the stochastic

on the interaction between risk sharing and capital accumulation in a stochastic olg model with production abstract we analyze the interaction between risk sharing and capital accumulation in a stochastic olg model with production we give a complete characterization of interim pareto optimal competitive equilibrium allocations furthermore we provide tests of pareto optimality suboptimality based on risky rates of return only

subgame perfect implementation this paper examines the use of stage mechanisms in implementation problems and provides a partial characterization of the set of subgam e perfect implementable choice rules it is shown that in many economic environments virtually an y choice rule can be implemented to illustrate the power of this approach the paper discusses a number of models in which it is possible to implement the first best although it wouldn t have been possible to do so without using stage mechanisms the diversity of these models suggests that subgame perfect implementation may find wide application copyright 1988 by the econometric society

subgame perfect implementation of bargaining solutions abstract this paper provides simple four stage game forms that fully implement a large class of two person bargaining solutions in subgame perfect equilibrium the solutions that can be implemented by our game forms are those that maximize a monotonic and quasi concave function of utilities after normalizing each agent s utility function so that the maximum utility is 1 and the utility of the disagreement outcome is 0 this class of solutions includes the nash kalai smorodinsky and relative utilitarian solutions the game forms have a structure of alternating offers and contain no integer device

should the good and the selfish be taxed differently in this paper we consider an environment where individual actions have externalities and two types of agents exist agents with social preferences the good and selfish agents selfish agents have pay off functions that do not take into account social welfare the pay off of an agent is a linear combination of social welfare and the pay off of a selfish agent we demonstrate that the corrective tax rates that maximize social welfare do not depend on the degree of social preferences hence the good and the selfish should not be taxed differently

producer opportunism in retailing contracts this paper analyzes the role of ex post producer opportunism on the optimal design of vertical restraints it considers vertical contracts as starting points of ex post renegotiation it shows that the alleged room for franchisor opportunism that seems quite important in franchising contracts can be seen as an insurance device when part of the goal of the contract is to provide a stable payoff to the franchisee this conclusion holds for various opportunistic strategies direct eviction of initial retailers excessive entry of new retailers on the market or resale price maintenance used to encourage voluntary exit of initial retailers

an ascending auctions for independent values uniqueness and robustness to strategic uncertainty we consider an single object auction environment with interdependent valuations and a generalized vickrey clark groves allocation mechanism that allocates the object almost e ciently in a strict ex post equilibrium if there is a signi cant amount of interdependence there are multiple rationalizable outcomes of this direct mechanism and any other mechanism that allocates the object almost e ciently this is true whether the agents know about each others payo types or not we consider an ascending price dynamic version of the generalized vcg mechanism when there is complete information among the agents of their payo types we show that the almost e cient allocation is the unique backward induction i e extensive form rationalizable outcome of the auction even when there are multiple rationalizable outcomes in the static version this example illustrates the role that open auctions may play in obtaining e cient allocations by reducing strategic uncertainty

efficient repeated implementation this paper examines repeated implementation of a social choice function scf with innitely lived agents whose preferences are determined randomly in each period an scf is repeated implementable in nash equilibrium if there exists a sequence of possibly history dependent mechanisms such that i its nash equilibrium set is non empty and ii every nash equilibrium outcome corresponds to the desired social choice at every possible history of past play and realizations of uncertainty we show with minor qualications that in the complete information environment an scf is repeated implementable in nash equilibrium if and only if it is ecient we also discuss several extensions of our analysis including constructions employing only nite mechanisms

optimal incentive contracts with multiple agents abstract a setting in which a single principal contracts with two agents who possess perfect private information about their own productivity is considered with correlated productivities each agent s private information also provides a signal about the other agent s productivity in contrast to the setting in which there is only one agent it is shown that such private information may be of no value to the agents it is only if the agents are risk averse that their private information may allow them to command rents moreover when the agents are constrained only to reveal their private information truthfully as a nash equilibrium the pareto optimal incentive scheme may induce the agents to adopt strategies other than truth telling this leads to the consideration of truth telling equilibria that are not pareto dominated in the subgame played by the agents among all such equilibria the one preferred by the principal restricts one agent to tell the truth as a dominant strategy and the other as a nash response to truth

renegotiation proof implementation and time preferences this paper explores how the requirement that the implementation of contracts be renegotiation proof affects the set of contracts that can be implemented in a seller buyer scenario in which the information regarding the agents valuations is nonverifiable this paper explicitly adds a time dimension to an implementa tion problem and introduces a natural criterion of renegotiation proofness for the case of time consuming renegotiation the main insight gained is that the addition of the time dimension enlarges significantly the set of contracts that can be implemented in a renegotiation proof manner jel c70 d23 this paper explores how the requirement that the implementation of contracts be renegotiation proof affects the set of con tracts that can be implemented in a seller buyer scenario in which the informa tion regarding the agents valuations is non verifiable the paper s main contributions are that first it explicitly adds a time di mension to an implementation problem and second it introduces a natural criterion of renegotiation proofness for the case of time consuming renegotiation for concreteness the discussion will be conducted in the context of the following example there are two agents a seller and a buyer who sign a contract for the sale of one unit in the future their valuations for the unit denoted by s and b respectively are not known when they sign the contract they become known to both parties after the contract is signed and before it is imple mented thus when it comes to implement ing the contract the parties information is complete but it is assumed to be nonverifi able i e not observable to third parties such as a court 1 when they sign the con tract the parties want to specify for any possible realization of the valuations s b whether or not there will be trade and the price p s b at which it will take place the contract describes the procedure that will be followed after the valuations are real ized the purpose of this procedure is to make sure that the original intentions of the parties are indeed carried out the idea is that the steps laid out in the contract are independent of s b and hence are en forceable by a third party or by a social convention in game theoretic terms a contract specifies a game form that imple ments the function p in the sense that for all s and b p s b is the resulting game s unique subgame perfect equilibrium out come in the context of this scenario we shall investigate the set of price functions p s b that can be so implemented by a contract and examine how this set is affected by the requirement that the contract be renegotia

complexity and repeated implementation this paper examines the problem of repeatedly implementing an ecient social choice function when the agents preferences evolve randomly we show that the freedom to set dierent mechanisms at dierent histories can give the planner an additional leverage to deter undesirable behavior even if the mechanisms are restricted to be simple and nite specically we construct a history dependent sequence of simple mechanisms such that with minor qualications every pure subgame perfect equilibrium delivers the correct social choice at every history while every mixed equilibrium is strictly pareto dominated more importantly when faced with agents with a preference for less complex strategies at the margin the ecient social choice function can be repeatedly implemented in subgame perfect equilibrium in pure or mixed strategies our results demonstrate a positive role for complexity considerations in mechanism design

balancing environmental protection and energy production in the federal hydropower licensing process the u s federal energy regulatory commission ferc must balance environmental protection of riverine resources with the nation s growing demand for power production every time it issues a hydroelectric license this paper models the bureaucratic agency s decision making process in issuing these licenses data on nearly 500 hydro power licenses issued from 1983 to 2005 are utilized it is discovered that legislative and institutional constraints are by far the largest influences on ferc s regulatory decisions implying that if the current allocation of surface water in the united states is considered inefficient the most effective way to alter this allocation is by passing new legislation or by implementing institutional reform at ferc

incentives and optimal size of local jurisdictions abstract a model of optimal territorial decentralization is presented in which smaller local governments have an informational advantage concerning public goods production costs and the central government has imperfect information on spillover effects induced by local projects the attention is focused on the optimal size of local entities and on the shape of transfer schedules from the central government to local jurisdictions the optimal territorial organization is a compromise between small jurisdictions so as to benefit from the geographical proximity effect on information and large entities in which spillover effects are more easily internalized by means of linear or non linear taxation schemes implemented by the centre

efficient mechanisms for multiple public goods abstract we propose two sequential mechanisms for efficient production of public goods our analysis differs from the existing literature in allowing for the presence of multiple public goods and in also being simple while both mechanisms ensure efficiency the payoffs in the first mechanism are asymmetric being sensitive to the order in which agents move the second mechanism corrects for this through a two stage game where the order of moves in the second stage is randomly determined the payoffs from the second mechanism correspond to the shapley value of a well defined game which summarizes the production opportunities available to coalitions in the economy

the mirrlees approach to mechanism design with renegotiation with applications to hold up and risk sharing the paper studies the implementation problem first analyzed by maskin and moore 1999 in which two agents observe an unverifiable state of nature and may renegotiate inefficient outcomes following play of the mechanism we develop a first order approach to characterizing the set of implementable utility mappings in this problem paralleling mirrlees s 1971 first order analysis of standard mechanism design problems we use this characterization to study optimal contracting in hold up and risk sharing models in particular we examine when the contracting parties can optimally restrict attention to simple contracts such as noncontingent contracts and option contracts where only one agent sends a message

a theory of competition among pressure groups for political influence this paper presents a theory of competition among pressure groups for political influence political equilibrium depends on the efficiency of each group in producing pressure the effect of additional pressure on their influence the number of persons in different groups and the deadweight cost of taxes and subsidies an increase in deadweight costs discourages pressure by subsidized groups and encourages pressure by taxpayers this analysis unifies the view that governments correct market failures with the view that they favor the politically powerful both are produced by the competition for political favors

does relationship specific investment depend on asset ownership evidence from a natural experiment in the housing market the classic hold up model grossman and hart 1986 predicts that allocations of asset ownership which expose a party to expropriation reduce relationship specific investments by this party in the empirical context of t he housing market i show that the hold up model predicts more relationship specific investments such as bathroom renovations in owner occupied housing than in rental housing i confirm this prediction for the german housing market to ob tain an exogenous variation of asset home ownership i use the natural experiment of the german reunification under the communist regime ownership exist ed but was economically meaningless it was a quasi random by product of dwelling choice yet after reunification ownership unexpectedly reacquired legal fo rce

a complete implementation of the efficient allocation of pollution abstract this paper presents a simple twofold mechanism that attains a complete implementation of the efficient allocation of pollution the first component is adopted from duggan and roberts duggan j roberts j 2002 implementing the efficient allocation of pollution american economic review 92 1070 1078 the second new component takes care of the moral hazard problem

competition and rail rates for the shipment of corn soybeans and wheat this article investigates the extent and importance of rate competition among railroads for the export shipment of three narrowly defined agricultural commodities since passage of the staggers rail act of 1980 which increased the railroads freedom to set rates i construct measures of intermodal and intramodal competition and find that each has strong impacts on rail rates the farther a shipper is from competing water transportation the more considerably rates rise rates fall as railroad competition in a region increases there appears to be some interaction between intermodal and intramodal competition i find that the competitive effects of two proposed rail mergers depend on the vigor of intermodal competition from truck and water transport and on the change in interrailroad competition that results from the reduced number of competing rail systems

implementing the efficient allocation of pollution we provide simple mechanisms to implement the efficient allocation of pollution first assuming complete information across firms and then allowing for incomplete information both mechanisms operate by inducing firms to monitor one another using firms reports to determine pollution allotments and transfers the complete information mechanism determines a firm s transfer according to a linear pollution price set by other firms both mechanisms can be modified to be budget balanced in and out of equilibrium the complete information mechanism implements the efficient allocation even when firms are allowed to use mixed strategies under a single crossing condition the same holds for the incomplete information mechanism this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

implementation with partial provability we extend implementation theory by allowing the social choice function to depend on more than just the preferences of the agents and allowing agents to support their statements with hard evidence we show that a simple condition on evidence is necessary for the implementation of a social choice function f when the preferences of the agents are state independent and sufficient for implementation for any preferences including state dependent with at least three agents if the social planner can perform small monetary transfers beyond those called for by f if transfers can be large f can be implemented in a game with perfect information when there are at least two players under a boundedness assumption for both results transfers only occur out of equilibrium the use of evidence enables implementation which is robust in the sense that the planner needs little information about agents preferences or beliefs and agents need little information about each others preferences our results are robust to evidence forgery at any strictly positive cost

love thy children abstract this paper proves that barro s 1974 debt neutrality proposition whose relevance hinges in an economy with bequest motives on bequests being operative in the economy without public debt is not applicable to a wide class of overlapping generation economies those with a weak bequest motive in particular it is shown that the bequest motive is always too weak and public debt therefore non neutral when non physical assets have a well defined function reducing oversavings in the corresponding economy without bequest motive i e when the non altruistic economy is dynamically inefficient

debt deficits and finite horizons the stochastic case abstract we introduce aggregate uncertainty and complete markets into blanchard s 1985 perpetual youth model we derive a simple expression for the pricing kernel that can be used to close a variety of equilibrium models in which the set of agents changes over time

a difficulty in implementing correlated equilibrium distributions we view achieving a particular correlated equilibrium distribution for a normal form game as an implementation problem we show using a parametric version of the two person chicken game that a social choice function that chooses any particular correlated equilibrium distribution does not satisfy maskin monotonicity and therefore can not be fully implemented in nash equilibrium thus no mechanism that aims to understand a correlated distribution as the unique outcome of nash equilibrium play can be found jel classi cation numbers c72 keywords correlated equilibrium distribution implementation monotonicity