monitoring as a motivation for ipo underpricing brennan and franks 1997 and stoughton and zechner 1998 provide contrasting arguments for why monitoring considerations create incentives for managers to underprice their firms ipos initial public offerings like smart and zutter 2003 we examine these arguments using a sample of u s ipos however we find evidence that the determinants of initial returns institutional shareholdings and post ipo likelihood of acquisition are not consistent with these arguments thus we conclude that monitoring considerations are not important determinants of ipo underpricing evidence that the prices of unseasoned new issues of common stock ipos in early secondary market trading are substantially higher on average than their offer prices has evoked an extensive literature trying to explain such underpricing while prior literature has tended to focus on uncertainty asymmetric information stories for such underpricing e g rock 1986 and benveniste and spindt 1989 recent literature has suggested that post ipo ownership considerations are also important more specifically this literature has suggested that monitoring considerations create incentives for managers to underprice their firm s stock in its first public offering brennan and franks 1997 for example argue that insiders have an incentive to underprice the ipo of their firm s stock in order to ensure its wide distribution thereby reducing the likelihood of being monitored or removed by new shareholders particularly institutional shareholders brennan and franks call their hypothesis the reduced monitoring hypothesis consistent with their hypothesis for a sample of 69 u k ipos during 1986 to 1989 they find that 1 smaller applicants are allocated a larger share of oversubscribed underpriced issues and 2 the size and amount of subsequent outside large shareholdings are inversely related to the firm s degree of ipo underpricing 1

estimation of the tenants benefits residing in public rental housing with unit size constraint in korea summary hicksian income equivalent variation ev has often been used to measure tenants benefits in evaluating public housing programmes a number of papers have so far attempted to apply hicksian ev under the implicit assumption of no constraint on unit size of public housing as a result overestimation of tenants benefits probably occurs where unit size constraints exist as in korea s public housing programme thus the purpose of the paper is to measure hicksian ev with the constraint in unit size of public housing by formulating a revised hicksian ev equation and comparing the result with constraint free cases it is found that hicksian ev with constraint in unit size decreases relative to that of the constraint free cases the extent of ev decrease depends on the income elasticity of demand for housing and the difference between the optimum consumption of public housing under rent support demand wanted and the actual constraint of unit size demand fulfilled

existence of free entry equilibrium in aggregative games with asymmetric agents in this paper we examine a free entry aggregative game where agents can be asymmetric we show the existence of a pure strategy subgame perfect equilibrium of this game the proof is a constructive one and therefore we provide a method to derive a subgame perfect equilibrium within a reasonable time

economics of residential crowding in developing countries residential crowding is one of the most noticeable problems of housing in developing countries crowding in these countries is characterized by two important phenomena first a room is usually shared by more than two persons second a single dwelling unit is occupied by more than one household in developed countries residential crowding was widely observed in their early industrial cities but is no longer common yet it constitutes a housing problem for their low income groups a typical policy objective addressed to residential crowding in both developed and developing countries is the provision of a single dwelling unit for every household for instance in the united kingdom the 1945 housing white paper stated that the government s first objective is to afford a this analysis is part of a study of the korean housing market sponsored by the world bank primary credit is due to gill chin lim and james follain in this paper helpful comments have been received from david bradford james trussel and bryan brown an earlier version of this paper was presented at the second conference on major international economic issues university of southern california los angeles and february 1979

models of stock returns a comparison in this paper a discrete mixture of normal distributions is proposed to explain the observed significant kurtosis fat tails and significant positive skewness in the distribution of daily rates of returns for a sample of common stocks and indexes stationarity tests on the parameter estimates of this discrete mixture of normal distributions model revealed significant differences in the mean estimates that can explain the observed skewness and significant differences in the variance estimates that can explain the observed kurtosis an alternative explanation for the observed fat tails is the symmetric student model the result of a comparison between the models is that the discrete mixture of normal distributions model has substantially more descriptive validity than the student model for many years both financial economists and statisticians have been concerned with the description of stock market returns the form of the distribution of stock returns is a crucial assumption for mean variance portfolio theory theoretical models of capital asset prices and the prices of contingent claims for example understanding the behavior of the variance is essential to option pricing models empirical tests of asset pricing models and the efficient markets hypothesis draw statistical inferences that are also conditional on distributional assumptions the most convenient assumption for financial theory and empirical methods is that the distribution of security rates of return be multivariate normal with parameters that are stationary over time since the normal distribution is stable under addition any arbitrary portfolio of stocks will also be normally distributed with the additional assumption of risk aversion mean variance theory follows furthermore the assumptions of normality and parameter stationarity are required for most of the econometric techniques typically used in empirical research tests of the normality hypothesis on the daily returns of the dow jones industrial stocks by fama 121 revealed more kurtosis fatter tails than that predicted from a sample of independent and identically distributed normal variates fama concluded from this evidence that the distribution of price changes conforms better to the stable paretian distribution with characteristic exponent

hedge funds the good the bad and the lucky we develop an estimation approach based on a modified expectation maximization em algorithm and a mixture of normal distributions associated with skill groups to assess performance in hedge funds by allowing luck to affect both skilled and unskilled funds we estimate the number of skill groups the fraction of funds from each group and the mean and variability of skill within each group for each individual fund we propose a performance measure combining the fund s estimated alpha with the cross sectional distribution of fund skill in out of sample tests an investment strategy using our performance measure outperforms those using estimated alpha and t statistic

identification and stochastic specification in rosen s hedonic price model abstract the use of an explicitly specified utility function to derive the inverse demand functions in s rosen s hedonic price model provides considerable insight into the correct stochastic specification of the model it turns out that except in special cases the inverse demand equations are nonlinear in parameters and cannot be formulated conveniently as regression models moreover the inverse demand functions and the hedonic price function must be estimated simultaneously to obtain consistent estimates of the parameters of these functions a tractable estimation technique is described it is desirable to derive the inverse demand functions from a utility specification that is not a strongly separable function of houses attributes since strong separability implies the existence of deterministic relations among incomes prices and observed housing attributes that may fail to hold in applications finally it is shown that the use of an explicitly specified utility function does not guarantee identification of the parameters of rosen s model

monotone comparative statics in games with non monotonic best replies contests and cournot oligopoly abstract in this paper we employ lattice theoretic techniques to derive a number of comparative statics in a logit contest a class of games for which best replies are generically non monotonic using the same approach we obtain several comparative statics in a cournot oligopoly model without imposing the usual assumptions that ensure the game is one of strategic substitutes our analysis illustrates how lattice theoretic techniques can deliver powerful insights in games with non monotonic best replies

equilibrium existence and uniqueness in impure public good models abstract despite widespread application of the impure public good model surprisingly little attention has been given to the model s equilibrium properties this paper presents a proof that clearly shows sufficient conditions for existence and uniqueness of a nash equilibrium

cournot oligopoly and the theory of supermodular games abstract we reconsider the cournot oligopoly problem in light of the theory of supermodular games invoking the recent ordinal version of this theory proposed by milgrom and shannon we generalize novshek s existence result derive the associated uniqueness result give an extension of a classical existence result under symmetry and provide conditions making a cournot oligopoly into a log supermodular game with the natural order on the action sets we also provide extensive and precise insight as to why decreasing best responses are widely regarded as being typical for the cournot model with production costs several illustrative examples are provided journal of economic literatureclassification numbers c72 l10 l13

housing crowding in developing countries and willingness to pay for additional space the case of korea the very rapid rate of urban population growth in developing countries is placing great strain on their housing stock housing policies which aim at reducing or eliminating crowding are generally based on notions of needs and standards of adequacy which are more often based on arbitrarily selected criteria than on domestic economic conditions this paper attempts to evaluate the willingness to pay for additional housing space by households and the validity of target housing standards the paper uses three different estimation procedures each with its own strengths and conceptual limitations to determine whether they yield consistent estimates of household willingness to pay for space they show consistently that the willingness to pay for additional space is less than 25 percent of the value of an extra unit of space everything else being equal

nash equilibrium existence and uniqueness in a club model abstract we model a single club heterogeneous consumer exogeneous income economy as an aggregative public good game under common assumptions if club quality functions are homogeneous of positive degree in the club facility investment and use an unique nash equilibrium exists

aggregate comparative statics abstract in aggregative games each player s payoff depends on her own actions and an aggregate of the actions of all the players many common games in industrial organization political economy public economics and macroeconomics can be cast as aggregative games this paper provides a general and tractable framework for comparative static results in aggregative games we focus on two classes of games 1 aggregative games with strategic substitutes and 2 nice aggregative games where payoff functions are continuous and concave in own strategies we provide simple sufficient conditions under which positive shocks to individual players increase their own actions and have monotone effects on the aggregate the results are illustrated with applications to public good provision contests cournot competition and technology choices in oligopoly

demand for housing attributes in developing countries a study of pakistan the paper has applied a conventional framework of analysis of implicit markets to determine the characteristics of demand for housing attributes of quantity and quality in the urban areas of a larg

price stabilization as a bonding mechanism in new equity issues abstract underwriters have an incentive to overstate investor interest in order to persuade some investors to purchase shares at a price in excess of their initial estimate of the fair value we show that this incentive is eliminated when the underwriter commits to secondary market price stabilization destroying the underwriter s incentive to overstate interest reduces the total surplus captured by initial investors in initial public offerings further efficiency gains are associated with penalty bid systems that permit the underwriter to make the stabilization commitment selectively price stabilization can thus be viewed as a bonding mechanism that improves the efficiency of the primary equity market

housing markets in third world cities research and policy into the 1990s abstract a review of analyses of urban housing markets is timely to suggest directions for research and policy in the next decade the neoclassical approach to housing economics is contrasted with a political economy framework with respect to the production or supply of housing and consumption or demand an argument is advanced for increased attention to the analysis of citywide housing markets using insights from both theoretical approaches and for research into processes of exchange such analyses should form the basis for policies which focus neither on selected income groups or residential areas in isolation from wider housing market processes nor on housing output targets but primarily on ensuring the provision of essential inputs

the contribution of environmental amenities to low income housing a comparative study of bangkok and jakarta central and local governments and their creditors are increasingly interested in cost recovery for public services these strategies have two aims increasing revenues and making a better connection between benefits received and consumer bills this paper estimates a hedonic model for household level data in a rare contrast of slums in two asian mega cities to provide comparative information about how the poor value environmental amenities and basic infrastructure access the results suggest that slum housing prices do reflect differentials in public service access and that rough estimates of the value of access can be cheaply and usefully obtained for planning purposes

signalling and the pricing of new issues this paper develops a signalling model with two signals two attributes and a continuum of signal levels and attribute types to explain new issue underpricing both the fraction of the new issue retained by the issuer and its offering price convey to investors the unobservable intrinsic value of the firm and the variance of its cash flows many of the model s comparative statics results are novel empirically testable and consistent with the existing empirical evidence on new issues in particular the degree of underpricing which can be inferred from observable variables is positively related to the firm s post issue share price

strategic complements and substitutes and potential games abstract we show that games of strategic complements or substitutes with aggregation are pseudo potential games the upshot is that they possess nash equilibria in pure strategies ne even if the strategy sets are not convex and that various dynamic processes converge to ne in particular ne exist in cournot oligopoly with indivisibilities in production our notion of aggregation is quite general and enables us to take a unified view of several disparate models

the power of money wealth effects in contests abstract the relationship between wealth and power has long been debated nevertheless this relationship has been rarely studied in a strategic game in this paper we study wealth effects in a strategic contest game two opposing effects arise wealth reduces the marginal cost of effort but it also reduces the marginal benefit of winning the contest we consider three types of contests which vary depending on whether rents and efforts are commensurable with wealth our theoretical analysis shows that the effects of wealth are strongly contest dependent it thus does not support general claims that the rich lobby more or that low economic growth and wealth inequality spur conflicts

stabilization syndication and pricing of ipos we argue that in the after market trading of an ipo the underwriting syndicate by standing ready to buy back shares at the offer price price stabilization compensates uninformed investors ex post for the adverse selection cost they face in bidding for ipos this domi nates ex ante compensation by underpricing the reason is that stabilization exploits ex post information about investor demand whereas underpricing must be based on ex ante infor mation however liquidity and syndication costs constrain the use of stabilization which in equilibrium generates some underpricing as well we develop a model that formalizes this intuition and generates several empirical implications

mean field equilibrium in dynamic games with strategic complementarities we study a class of stochastic dynamic games that exhibit strategic complementarities between players formally in the games we consider the payoff of a player has increasing differences between her own state and the empirical distribution of the states of other players such games can be used to model a diverse set of applications including network security models recommender systems and dynamic search in markets stochastic games are generally difficult to analyze and these difficulties are only exacerbated when the number of players is large as might be the case in the preceding examples we consider an approximation methodology called mean field equilibrium to study these games in such an equilibrium each player reacts to only the long run average state of other players we find necessary conditions for the existence of a mean field equilibrium in such games furthermore as a simple consequence of this existence theorem we obtain several natural monotonicity properties we show that there exist a largest and a smallest equilibrium among all those where the equilibrium strategy used by a player is nondecreasing and we also show that players converge to each of these equilibria via natural myopic learning dynamics as we argue these dynamics are more reasonable than the standard best response dynamics we also provide sensitivity results where we quantify how the equilibria of such games move in response to changes in parameters of the game for example the introduction of incentives to players

equilibrium bias of technology this paper presents three sets of results about equilibrium bias of technology first i show that when the menu of technological possibilities only allows for factor augmenting technologies the increase in the supply of a factor induces technological change relatively biased toward that factor meaning that the induced technological change increases the relative marginal product of the factor becoming more abundant moreover this induced bias can be strong enough to make the relative marginal product of a factor increasing in response to an increase in its supply thus leading to an upward sloping relative demand curve i also show that these results about relative bias do not generalize when more general menus of technological possibilities are considered second i prove that under mild assumptions the increase in the supply of a factor induces technological change that is absolutely biased toward that factor meaning that it increases its marginal product at given factor proportions the third and most important result in the paper establishes the possibility of and conditions for strong absolute equilibrium bias whereby the price marginal product of a factor increases in response to an increase in its supply i prove that under some regularity conditions there will be strong absolute equilibrium bias if and only if the aggregate production function of the economy fails to be jointly concave in factors and technology this type of failure of joint concavity is possible in economies where equilibrium factor demands and technologies result from the decisions of different agents

the evolution of walrasian behavior consider an evolutionary context where a given number of quantity setting oligopolists tend to mimic successful behavior occasionally experimenting with some small probability in this context it is shown that the unique long run outcome of the process has all firms playing walrasian i e choosing an output that maximizes profits when taking the market clearing price as given

the demand for housing characteristics in developing countries this paper develops and estimates an econometric model of the household demand for housing characteristics the model is estimated using data from five cities and three developing countries overall the procedures employed work well in a wide variety of circumstances more specifically it is found that 1 household willingness to pay for living space increases with income but at a less than proportionate rate 2 willlingness to pay for living space declines as household size increases 3 willingness to pay for several quality measures structural quality wall roof and floor quality is quite responsive to income

successful leadership in global public good provision incorporating behavioural approaches in the standard model of voluntary public good provision and other game theoretic models climate friendly leadership of a country is not successful a unilateral increase of this country s greenhouse gas abatement measures i e contributions to the global public good of climate protection will not lead to a positive reaction by the other countries but instead trigger a reduction of their abatement efforts and thus a crowding out effect in this paper it is shown how this undesired consequence need no longer occur when elements of behavioral economics are incorporated in the otherwise standard model of public good provision in particular strategic complementarities between the public good contribution of the leading country and those of the follower may result either if the follower has specific non egoistic or other regarding preferences or if the leader s contribution positively affects the follower s beliefs i e his conjectural variations about the leader s behaviour

rent seeking incentives in share contests abstract this article investigates share contests in our framework we allow contestants to have more general preferences than have been used in the literature previous approaches have the unfortunate characteristic that contestants marginal rates of substitution between the rent share allocated by the contest and their effort is constant regardless of the size of the rent share this results in a conventional wisdom larger rents command more effort by providing a more general framework we show the reverse may also be true and we derive the conditions under which this is the case our approach then allows us to rationalize within a standard contest framework observations that rents might be more hotly contested when they become scarcer as has evidently been the case with the recent global contraction of public funds available for public policy

conflict and rent seeking success functions ratio vs difference models of relative success the rent seeking competitions studied by economists fall within a much broader category of conflict interactions that also includes military combats election campaigns industrial disputes lawsuits and sibling rivalries in the rent seeking literature each party s success pi which can be interpreted either as the probability of victory or as the proportion of the prize won has usually been taken to be a function of the ratio of the respective resource commitments alternatively however pi may instead be a function of the difference between the parties commitments to the contest the contest success function csf for the difference from is a logistic curve in which as is consistent with military experience increasing returns apply up to an inflection point at equal resource commitments a crucial flaw of the traditional ratio model is that neither onesided submission nor two sided peace between the parties can ever occur as a cournot equilibrium in contrast both of these outcomes are entirely consistent with a model in which success is a function of the difference between the parties resource commitments

theory general equilibrium and political economy in development economics i discuss the role of economic theory in empirical work in development economics with special emphasis on general equilibrium and political economy considerations i argue that economic theory plays should play a central role in formulating models estimates of which can be used for counterfactual and policy analysis i discuss why counterfactual analysis based on microdata that ignores general equilibrium and political economy issues may lead to misleading conclusions i illustrate the main arguments using examples from recent work in development economics and political economy

anatomy of initial public offerings of common stock initial public offerings of common stocks ipos are typically underpriced in this paper the author develops and tests the hypothesis that underpricing serves as a form of insurance against legal liability and the associated damages to the reputations of investment bankers the empirical results based on samples of ipos that were brought to the market before and after the securities act of 1933 provide considerable support for the implicit insurance hypothesis specifically gross underpricing and market segmentation between prestigious and fringe investment bankers in originating unseasoned new issues appear to be peculiar to the post 1933 era a number of studies have documented that unseasoned common stocks typically garner large positive abnormal returns during a short period following the initial offering in his recent review of the empirical evidence on the initial returns of common stock offerings smith 36 concluded that the returns from offer price to after market price have exceeded fifteen percent his calculations did not include some of the earlier results obtained by mcdonald and fisher 23 and logue 20 when their samples are combined with those in smith s review the initial returns of unseasoned equity offerings appear even larger over seventeen percent these results imply that underwriters consistently offer the securities at substantial discounts from their values that are set in the after market in other words initial public offerings ipos appear to be underpriced what is even more puzzling is the fact that in some time periods underpricing appears to be systematically larger than in other periods ibbotson and jaffe 15 and ritter 29 have documented that during the postwar era there have been a number of periods in which the initial returns of common stocks have been extremely high ritter for example reported that the average return from the offer price to the first after market price was over forty eight percent for ipos in 1980 and 1981 1 similarly the initial returns of unseasoned issues of common stock brought to the market in 1950 1951 1961 and 1968 were unusually large these periods in which ipos were grossly underpriced are referred to as the hotissue markets why do investment bankers underprice ipos why do issuers

price stabilization in the market for new issues abstract this study examines price stabilization in new equity issues stabilizationtruncates the distribution of post issue prices at a floor price lowering the risk of adverse price moves and hence in a competitive dealer market reducing the bid ask spread using 1 523 nasdao traded firm commitment initial public offerings issued between 1982 and 1987 we find that spreads narrow when the market price is close to the offer price and stabilization is most likely moreover significant negative returns are documented after the hypothesized termination of stabilizing activities suggesting that stabilization and its cessation affect market prices

evolution and kantian morality what kind of preferences should one expect evolution to favor we propose a definition of evolutionary stability of preferences in interactions in groups of arbitrary finite size groups are formed under random matching that may be assortative individuals preferences are their private information the set of potential preferences are all those that can be represented by continuous functions we show that a certain class of such preferences that combine self interest with morality of a kantian flavor are evolutionarily stable and that preferences resulting in other behaviors are evolutionarily unstable we also establish a connection between evolutionary stability of preferences and a generalized version of maynard smith s and price s 1973 notion of evolutionary stability of strategies

signalling by underpricing in the ipo market abstract empirical evidence suggests the existence of hot issue markets for initial public offerings in certain periods and in certain industries new issues are underpriced and rationing occurs this paper develops a model consistent with this observation which assumes the firm itself best knows its prospects in certain circumstances firms with the most favorable prospects find it optimal to signal their type by underpricing their initial issue of shares and investors know that only the best can recoup the cost of this signal from subsequent issues

trade and insecure resources we construct a model of conflict and trade to study the consequences of interstate disputes over contested resources land oil water or other resources for arming welfare and trade flows different trade regimes imply different costs of such disputes in terms of arming depending on world prices free trade can intensify arming to such an extent that the additional security costs it brings swamp the traditional gains from trade and thus render autarky more desirable for one or all rival states free trade though is always an equilibrium and sometimes is a dominant one with features of a prisoner s dilemma outcome furthermore contestation of resources can reverse a country s apparent comparative advantage relative to its comparative advantage in the absence of conflict and where such conflict is present comparisons of autarkic prices to world prices could be inaccurate predictors of trade patterns

hedonic prices demands for urban housing amenities and benefit estimates abstract this paper uses a rosen two step hedonic price trait demand approach to estimate demand functions for a vector of urban amenities to ascertain whether this theoretically preferred approach yields benefit estimates which differ from the oft used ridker henning one step hedonic approach we conduct a sensitivity analysis we find that the two step approach does yield different benefit estimates and that the differences are large for some amenities the estimates are sensitive to the functional form of the hedonic equation when the forms are significantly different according to modified box cox results but are not particularly sensitive to specification of the amenity demand equation

underwriter price support and the ipo underpricing puzzle abstract this paper reassesses the apparent systematic underpricing of initial public offerings ipos investigation of the distribution of initial returns following ipos shows that positive mean initial returns may reflect the existence of a partially unobserved left negative tail moreover most ipos with zero one day returns subsequently fall in price suggesting that underwriter price support may account for the skewed distribution and hence the phenomenon of positive average initial ipo returns even if offering prices are set at expected market value this paper thus challenges the presumption underlying previous research that positive average initial ipo returns result primarily from deliberate underpricing

evidence on price stabilization and underpricing in early ipo returns using data on 560 firm commitment initial public offerings of common stock for the 1982 1983 period we find that the cross sectional distribution of one day returns is modeled better as a mixture of two distributions with the parameter estimates of one distribution being consistent with underpricing and the other with price stabilization further the evidence that early ipo returns are drawn from a mixture distribution persists for at least four weeks the implications of these results for the analysis of ipo returns are illustrated by examining the influence of a measure of ex ante price uncertainty on ipo pricing

fully aggregative games abstract a game is fully aggregative if payoffs and marginal payoffs depend only on a player s own strategy and a function of the strategy profile which is common to all players we characterize the form which this function must take in such a game and show that the game will be strategically equivalent to another game in which the function is the simple sum of strategies

nonlinear budget constraints and consumer demand an application to public programs for residential housing abstract this study presents a methodology for exploiting the nonlinear hedonic nature of housing prices to estimate the compensated demands of households for particular housing attributes the methodology is employed to provide hicksian benefit measures of a particular housing subsidy program typical of those undertaken recently in developing countries

political economy of dynamic resource wars abstract the political economy of exhaustible resource extraction is analysed in three contexts first if an incumbent faces a threat of being removed once and for all by a rival faction extraction becomes more voracious if the factions do not share rents equally second perennial political conflict cycles are more inefficient if constitutional cohesiveness or the partisan in office bias is large and political instability is high third resource wars are more intense if constitutional cohesiveness is weak the incumbent has a partisan in office bias reserves of resources are high the wage is low governments can be less frequently removed from office and fighting technology has less decreasing returns to scale resource depletion in such wars is more rapacious if there is more government instability the political system is less cohesive and the partisan in office bias is smaller

strategic interactions among private and public efforts when preventing and stamping out a highly infectious animal disease upon the outbreak of a contagious animal disease a primary motive for restoring disease free status is often to regain access to international product markets efforts applied toward continuing or regaining such access generate a public good all growers benefit regardless of the extent of private effort taken while exclusion is impractical private incentives to take preventive measures and stamp out effort interact in complex ways there are intra farm temporal interactions and also inter farm contemporaneous interactions public effort also takes place and interacts with private effort this paper provides a succinct multi agent model to explore these interactions in social optimum and in nash equilibrium and also to explore how socially optimal and nash behavior differ comparative statics under social optimality are more straightforward than under nash equilibrium whether it is in social optimum or nash equilibrium public prevention effort complements both private prevention and private stamp out efforts however public stamp out effort substitutes for both private stamp out and private prevention efforts reasonable conditions are identified under which nash levels of private prevention and stamp out efforts are both below socially optimal levels concerning policy prescriptions secure property rights and low property transfer costs should promote prevention and eradication efforts other things being equal public prevention effort should be more effective at improving welfare than comparable public stamp out effort subsidies on private effort should favor prevention because subsidies on eradication effort may discourage prevention effort even if products from diseased animals are safe to consume and acceptable to consumers it may be optimal to destroy them

a model of the demand for investment banking advising and distribution services for new issues this paper presents a theory of the demand for investment banking advising and distribution services for the case in which the investment banker is better informed about the capital market than is the issuer and the issuer cannot observe the distribution effort expended by the banker the optimal contract under which the offer price decision is delegated to the better informed banker in order to deal with the adverse selection and moral hazard problems resulting from the informational asymmetry and the observability problem is characterized the model demonstrates a positive demand for investment banking advising and distribution services and provides an explanation of the underpricing of new issues an investment banker performs three functions which may be of value to an issuer of new securities underwriting advising and distribution this paper presents a theory of the demand for investment banking advising and distribution services based on an informational asymmetry between an issuer of new securities and an investment banker ultimately a theory of the organization of the financial intermediary industry is required that would predict which firms would use which types of financial intermediaries for which purposes and which firms would raise capital without engaging the services of a financial intermediary only a limited set of such predictions are developed here in the context of a model of a fixedprice offering under a negotiated contract in which the investment banker is

sequential sales learning and cascades when ipo shares are sold sequentially later potential investors can learn from the purchasing decisions of earlier investors this can lead rapidly to cascades in which subsequent investors optimally ignore their private information and imitate earlier investors although rationing in this situation gives rise to a winner s curse it is irrelevant the model predicts that 1 offerings succeed or fail rapidly 2 demand can be so elastic that even risk neutral issuers underprice to completely avoid failure 3 issuers with good inside information can price their shares so high that they sometimes fail 4 an underwriter may want to reduce the communication among investors by spreading the selling effort over a more segmented market consider a scenario in which an issuer is selling a new security of uncertain value for example an ipo initial public offering of stock or high yield debt through an underwriter the s e c has banned variable price sales while the value of this new security is highly uncertain to individual market participants investors hold perfectly accurate information when aggregated moreover there are many potential investors and a small number of these investors can jointly determine the value of the firm or its project with high precision it would seem that in this scenario underpriced offerings would succeed and overpriced offerings would fail nevertheless this paper shows that if the distribution channels of invest ment banks are limited underpriced offerings can fail and overpriced offer ings can succeed with limited distribution channels it takes the under writer time to approach interested investors therefore later investors can observe how well an offering has sold to date or at least how successful it has sold relative to offerings previously undertaken by this underwriter

hedonic prices property values and measuring environmental benefits a survey of the issues this paper provides a review of the theoretical basis and the assumptions required in order to use hedonic price equations derived from property value data to obtain measures of the prices and the inverse demand functions for environmental amenities such as air quality it also includes a review and assessment of existing empirical applications of the technique to problems of air and water quality and urban noise

robust comparative statics for non monotone shocks in large aggregative games a policy change that involves a redistribution of income or wealth is typically controversial affecting some people positively but others negatively in this paper we extend the robust comparative statics result for large aggregative games established by acemoglu and jensen 2010 49th ieee conference on decision and control 3133 3139 to possibly controversial policy changes in particular we show that both the smallest and the largest equilibrium values of an aggregate variable increase in response to a policy change to which individuals reactions may be mixed but the overall aggregate response is positive we provide sufficient conditions for such a policy change in terms of distributional changes in parameters

which microfinance institutions are becoming more cost effective with time evidence from a mixture model italian speakers tend to stress the second component of german morphologically complex words such as compounds and prefix verbs even if the first component is lexically stressed to improve their prosodic phrasing an automatic pronunciation teaching method was developed based on auditory feedback of prosodically corrected utterances in the learners own voices basically the method copies contours of f0 local speech rate and intensity from reference utterances of a german native speaker to the learners speech signals it also adds emphasis to the stress position in order to help the learners better recognise the correct pronunciation and identify their errors a perception test with german native speakers revealed that manipulated utterances significantly better reflect lexical stress than the corresponding original utterances thus two groups of italian learners of german were provided with different feedback during a training session one group with manipulated utterances in their individual voices and the other with correctly pronounced original utterances in the teacher s voice afterwards both groups produced the same sentences again and german native speakers judged the resulting utterances resynthesised stimuli especially with emphasised stress were found to be a more effective feedback than natural stimuli to learn the correct stress position since resynthesis was obtained without previous segmentation of the learners speech signals this technology could be effectively included in computer assisted language learning software

rationalizability learning and equilibrium in games with strategic complementarities we study a rich class of noncooperative games that includes models of oligopoly competition macroeconomic coordination failures arms races bank runs technology adoption and diffusion r d competition pretrial bargaining coordination in teams and many others for all these games the sets of pure strategy nash equilibria correlated equilibria and rationalizable strategies have identical bounds also for a class of models of dynamic adaptive choice behavior that encompasses both best response dynamics and bayesian learning the players choices lie eventually within the same bounds these bounds are shown to vary monotonically with certain exogenous parameters we study the class of noncooperative supermodular games introduced by topkis 1979 and further analyzed by vives 1985 1989 who also pointed out the importance of these games in industrial economics supermodular games are games in which each player s strategy set is partially ordered the marginal returns to increasing one s strategy rise with increases in the competitors strategies so that the game exhibits strategic complementarity 2 and if a player s strategies are multidimensional marginal returns to any one com ponent of the player s strategy rise with increases in the other components this class turns out to encompass many of the most important economic applications of noncooperative game theory in macroeconomics diamond s 1982 search model and bryant s 1983 1984 rational expectations models can be represented as supermodular games in each of these models more activity by some members of the economy raises the returns to increased levels of activity by others in oligopoly theory some models of bertrand oligopoly with differentiated products qualify as supermodu lar games in these games when a firm s competitors raise their prices the marginal profitability of the firm s own price increase rises a similar structure is present in games of new technology adoption such as those of dybvig and spatt 1983 farrell and saloner 1986 and katz and shapiro 1986 when more users hook into a communication system or more manufacturers adopt an interface standard the marginal return to others of doing the same often rises similarly in some specifications of the bank runs model introduced by diamond and dybvig 1983 when more depositors withdraw their funds from a bank it is more worthwhile for other depositors to do the same in the warrant exercise

comparative statics of contests and rent seeking games this paper develops the comparative statics properties of a contest encountered in patent races and rent seeking games the author shows that symmetric equilibrium expenditure and profit per player decrease with the number of competitors and the discount rate but increase with the value of the prize a fundamental lemma established in the paper shows that a stability condition usually imposed on the model is automatically satisfied the author identifies a class of likelihood or hazard rate functions for which aggregate expenditure increases with the number of competitors and total profits converge to zero copyright 1997 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

tenure security and urban squatting while recent studies have shown that up to 35 of the total urban population of the third world live in squatter settlements there is a dearth of economic analysis on the phenomenon of squatting this paper attempts to fill this gap the equilibrium model argues that the difference in unit housing prices between the non squatting formal sector of a city and its squatting informal sector reflects the premium associated with a secure tenure status the empirical portion of this paper uses hedonic price techniques to derive the average premium on tenure security in a medium sized philippine city davao results show that formal sector unit dwelling prices are about 18 renters to 58 owners more than in the informal sector these equilibrium price differentials were found to be greater for lower income groups larger household sizes and households with older heads for renters and younger heads for

on the existence of cournot equilibrium this paper examines the existence of n firm cournot equilibrium in a market for a single homogeneous commodity it proves that if each firm s marginal revenue declines as the aggregate output of other firms increases which is implied by concave inverse demand then a cournot equilibrium exists without assuming that firms have nondecreasing marginal cost or identical technologies also if the marginal revenue condition fails at a potential optimal point there is a set of firms such that no cournot equilibrium exists the paper also contains an example of nonexistence with two nonidentical firms each with constant returns to scale production