strikes as a result of imperfect information this paper proposes a model of the bargaining process that recognizes that negotiators have only imperfect information at their command the author argues that the probability of a strike occurring will increase if one party bases its perception of the opponent s position on the same variables employed to form its own position when the opponent s position is in fact based on different variables strike probability is therefore assumed to be related to movements in variables of interest to only one side the model is tested on a sample of fourteen bargaining relationships drawn from the series wage chronology published by the bureau of labor statistics which details settlements between particular firms and unions over a period of about thirty years estimates of strike probability are derived from the maximum likelihood logit procedure the findings suggest that although both relative and absolute wage increases in a firm have a negative effect on strike frequency relative changes are more important

neighborhood information exchange and voter participation an experimental study we study the effect of social embeddedness on voter turnout by investigating the role of information about other voters decisions we do so in a participation game in which we distinguish between early and late voters each late voter is told about one early voter s turnout decision cases are distinguished where the voters are allies support the same group or adversaries with opposing preferences and where they are uncertain about each other s preferences our experimental results show that the social embeddedness matters this information increases aggregate turnout by approximately 50 the largest effect is observed for allies early voters strategically try to use their first mover position and late voters respond to this

cournot oligopoly with information sharing this paper studies the incentives for information sharing among firms in a cournot oligopoly facing a linear uncertain demand and an affine conditional expectation information structure no information sharing is found to be the unique equilibrium in two cases in which the signals with equal precision are assumed indivisible and infinitely divisible however the nonpooling equilibrium converges to the situation where the pooling strategies are adopted as the amount of information increases hence the efficiency is achieved in the competitive equilibrium as the number of the firm become large

land acquisition political intervention fragmentation and voice abstract this paper develops a simple dynamic framework of holdout in land acquisition both with and without political intervention where holdout arises because of the landowners inability to manage large sums of money and consequent lack of inter temporal consumption smoothing in case of sale formalized as landowners having sophisticated present biased preferences we then use this framework to analyze two issues of interest political intervention and fragmentation we find that politicization cannot improve efficiency if holdout is landowner induced and may even increase inefficiency if holdout is buyer induced further the extent of politicization depends on whether it involves voice for non members or not turning to the effects of fragmentation we find that while it increases holdout in the absence of politicization in the presence of politicization this effect may however be reversed

strikes and holdouts in wage bargaining theory and data we develop a private information model of union contract negotiations in which disputes signal a firm s willingness to pay previous models have assumed that all labor disputes take the form of a strike yet a prominent feature of u s collective bargaining is the holdout negotiations often continue without a strike after the contract has expired production continues with workers paid according to the expired contract we analyze the union s decision to strike or hold out and highlight its importance to strike activity strikes are more likely to occur after a drop in the real wage or a decline in unemployment

macro shocks and costly political action in non democracies this paper presents a theory of political instability in autocracies where the disenfranchised express their political preferences for a leadership replacement through costly political action we focus on the business regulatory environment as an arena for autocratic rent creation as a source of information asymmetry between the autocrat and the disenfranchised and as a potential political grievance for the disenfranchised within this context we revisit the role of macro shocks as a catalyst for political instability and propose a novel informational channel through which macro shocks may trigger costly political action when the autocrat chooses to create rents through regulation that deteriorates the mean macroeconomic outcome we then provide an empirical investigation of our theoretical hypotheses employing fixed effects panel regressions and an instrumental variable strategy over a sample of non democratic countries consistent with our theoretical hypotheses we demonstrate that adverse economic shocks increase the probability of mass protest episodes but that the magnitude of the effect depends on the extent to which business regulation is market distorting

price setting supergames with capacity constraints this paper examines the role of industry capacity in enforcing collusion in the context of repeated games for a fixed capacity per firm it is shown that changes in the number of firms have a non monotone effect on the best enforceable cartel price this is due to the fact that while an additional firm lowers the share that each of the other firms enjoys at the collusive price it also increases the losses to each firm should the cartel fail

bargaining and strikes strikes are generally regarded as an important economic phenomenon and yet good theoretical explanations of them are hard to come by the difficulty is to understand why rational parties should resort to a wasteful mechanism as a way of distributing the gains from trade why could not both parties be made better off by moving to the final distribution of surplus immediately or if it is uncertain to its certainty equivalent and sharing the benefits from increased production

tax incidence in a simple general equilibrium model with collusion and entry abstract we develop a two sector general equilibrium model in which oligopolistic firms collude non cooperative and earn positive economic profits even though there is free entry entry decisions involve balancing sunk costs with the present value of future profits the interest rate is determined in a capital market in which ownership of the capital stock and shares of firms are traded since the degrees of collusion and entry depend on future profits both are influenced by the interest rate we show how tax induced changes in the interest rate affect market structure in general entry and collusive pricing effects work in opposite directions

decentralisation and accountability in infrastructure delivery in developing countries many developing countries are experimenting with decentralisation of public service delivery to elected local governments instead of bureaucrats appointed by a central government we study the resulting implications in a theoretical model in which the central government is uninformed about local need and unable to monitor service allocations bureaucrats charge bribes for services as monopoly providers resulting in underprovision of services especially for the poor local governments are directly responsive to their citizens needs but may be subject to capture by elites effects of decentralisation on service volumes efficiency and equity are analysed under different financing arrangements for local governments the theme of the 2004 world development report is summarised by its opening paragraph too often services fail poor people in access in quantity in quality but the fact that there are strong examples where services do work means governments and citizens can do better how by putting poor people at the center of service provision by enabling them to monitor and discipline service providers by amplifying their voice in policymaking and by strengthening the incentives for providers to serve the poor problems of accountability associated with traditional modes of delivery involving centralised bureaucracies include cost padding service diversion limited responsiveness to local needs limited access and high prices charged especially to the poor 1 many developing countries have thus begun to experiment with initiatives to increase accountability of service providers by providing greater control rights to citizen groups these include decentralisation of service delivery to local governments community participation direct transfers to households and contracting out delivery to private providers and ngos the programmes include a wide range of infrastructure services water sanitation electricity telecommunications roads and social services education health and welfare programmes countries where such trends have gathered

information aggregation through costly political action information about various policy alternatives is dispersed among the individual members of a society prior to a vote over the alternatives some people take costly political action to signal their private information to voters by informing voting decisions political action has potential to decrease the likelihood that voters cast mistaken votes perhaps surprisingly preelection communication may be counterproductive the dispersed information is partially aggregated by the vote and political action may contribute noise to the voting process in some cases the voting mechanism is more likely to implement the full information voting outcome in the absence of preelection political action copyright 1994 by american economic association

why vote for losers voting theory generally concludes that in first past the post elections all votes should go to effective candidates duverger s law and parties should adopt a similar platform median voter theorem however such predictions are not always met in practice we show why divergence and vote dispersion is a natural outcome when a parties are opportunistic b there is uncertainty on the position of the median voter and c elections are repeated voting for losers increases the informational content of elections and may induce mainstream parties to relocate towards extremists as a result to maximize their probability of being elected they do not adopt median

strikes wages and private information private information models of strikes suggest that the strike is used as an information revealing device by the union in the presence of asymmetrical information a testable prediction of these models is that there is a negative relationship between strikes and the unpredicted component of the wage this paper finds evidence of such a relationship in a large sample of u s labor contracts the real wage falls by about 3 percent after a strike lasting one hundred days copyright 1989 by american economic association

do political protests matter evidence from the tea party movement can protests cause political change or are they merely symptoms of underlying shifts in policy preferences this paper studies the effect of the tea party movement in the united states which rose to prominence through a series of rallies across the country on april 15 tax day 2009 to identify the causal effect of protests we use an instrumental variables approach that exploits variation in rainfall on the day of the coordinated rallies weather on tax day robustly predicts rally attendance and the subsequent local strength of the movement as measured by donations media coverage social networking activity and later events we show that larger rallies cause an increase in turnout in favor of the republicans in the 2010 congressional elections and increase the likelihood that incumbent democratic representatives retire incumbent policymaking is affected as well representatives respond to large protests in their district by voting more conservatively in congress finally the estimates imply significant multiplier effects for every protester republican votes increase by seven to fourteen votes together our results show that protests can build political movements that ultimately affect policy and they suggest that it is unlikely that these effects arise solely through the standard channel of private information revelation

risk and revelation changing the value of information a different approach is introduced to determine the value of an information sharing agreement the measure of risk aversion loving this approach reveals the relationship between information sharing models and the risk literature it also allows uncertainty regarding the slope of a firm s own demand function to be examined which previous work eschews the results suggest that the incentive to reveal information is more prevalent than previously thought firms prefer to commit to reveal private valued information in both quantity and price competition this differs from previous work where the incentive to commit depended on the type of competition

divergent expectations as a cause of disagreement in bargaining evidence from a comparison of arbitration schemes the fact that settlement rates are much higher where final offer arbitration rather than conventional arbitration is the dispute settlement procedure is used as the basis of a test of the role of divergent and relatively optimistic expectations in causing disagreement in negotiations calculations of identical expectations contract zones using existing estimates of models of arbitrator behavior yield larger identical expectations contract zones in conventional arbitration than in final offer arbitration this evidence clearly suggests that divergent expectations alone are not an adequate explanation of disagreement in labor management negotiations a number of alternative explanations for disagreement are suggested and evaluated

information access and contributions a signaling model of lobbying interest groups pay monetary contributions to gain access and provide information to a policymaker if their interests are aligned with those of the policymaker s constituency they have costless access and report their private information truthfully if their interests conflict they are forced to pay a strictly positive contribution in order to enhance the credibility of their reports the policymaker bases her policy decision on the competing reports and the size of the contributions accompanying these reports the interest groups contribution decisions are plagued by a free rider problem i derive the implications of this problem for the size and pattern of contributions and for the degree of information aggregation

trust coordination and the industrial organization of political activism we study political activism by several interest groups with private signals when their ideological distance to the policymaker is small a low trust regime prevails agents frequently lobby even when it is unwarranted taking advantage of the cone rmation provided by others activism conversely the policymaker responds only to generalized pressure when ideological distance is large a high trust regime prevails lobbying behavior is disciplined by the potential contradiction from abstainers and the policymaker s response threshold is correspondingly lower within some intermediate range both equilibria coexist we then study the optimal organization of ine uence activities contrasting welfare levels when interest groups act independently and when they coordinate jel d72 d78 d82

the financial and operating performance of newly privatized firms an international empirical analysis this study compares the pre and postprivatization financial and operating performance of 61 companies from 18 countries and 32 industries that experience full or partial privatization through public share offerings during the period 1961 to 1990 our results document strong performance improvements achieved surprisingly without sacrificing employment security specifically after being privatized firms increase real sales become more profitable increase their capital investment spending improve their operating efficiency and increase their work forces furthermore these companies significantly lower their debt levels and increase dividend payout finally we document significant changes in the size and composition of corporate boards of directors after privatization the last fifteen years have witnessed a significant global shift away from state socialism towards entrepreneurial capitalism one of the most important and visible aspects of this trend has been the enthusiasm with which governments of all political persuasions have sold their state owned enterprises soes to private investors in hopes that the generally unsatisfactory economic performance of these firms can be improved by the discipline of private ownership this denationalization process given its current title of privatization by the conservative government of margaret thatcher in

political economy information and incentives abstract this paper shows how the instruments of incentive theory can be used to develop some views about the proper design of governments to avoid the capture of politicians and bureaucrats by interest groups first treating politicians as informed supervisors to whom economic policy is delegated we show the usefulness of the separation of powers to increase the transaction costs of collusion the relevance of asymmetric control for avoiding reciprocal favors the incompleteness of the constitutional contract leaves discretion to politicians who become residual decision makers we study the trade offs between greater efficiency obtained by allowing powerful instruments to politicians and less discretion by restricting on the contrary those instruments determinants of those trade offs are the variability of the environment the extent of asymmetric information about tastes and technologies and the size of majorities finally we show the new theory of incentives for group behavior can be used to determine the transaction costs of collusion under asymmetric information and to which extent these costs relax the constraints imposed on government by collusive behavior

logit estimates of strike incidence from canadian contract data logit estimates of strike incidence are made based on a unique and comprehensive data set of 2 437 collective agreements the appropriate level of aggregation since that is where bargaining occurs the results are interpreted through a theoretical framework emphasizing that strikes are more likely when the joint costs of using the strike mechanism are low relative to the cost of alternative mechanisms for achieving the same purposes such functions of strikes are to generate information elicit truth telling establish reputations provide catharsis and solve intraorganizational conflict

strategic delay in bargaining with two sided uncertainty the role of strategic delay is analyzed in an infinite horizon alternating offer model of bargaining a buyer and seller are engaged in the trade of a single object both bargainers have private information about their own preferences and are impatient in that delaying agreement is costly an equilibrium is constructed in which the bargainers signal the strength of their bargaining positions by delaying prior to making an offer a bargainer expecting large gains from trade is more impatient than one expecting small gains and hence makes concessions earlier on trade occurs whever gains from trade exist but due to the private information only after costly delay panmunjom korea upi the american general and the north korean general glared at each other across the table and the only sound was the wind howling across the barren hills outside their hut maj gen james b knapp negotiator for the united nations command unc was waiting for maj gen ri choonsun of the democratic people s republic of north korea to propose a recess they sat there arms folded for 42 hours not a word finally gen ri got up walked out and drove away evening bulletin philadelphia 11 april 1969

optimal cartel trigger price strategies abstract a dynamical model of industry equilibrium is described in which a cartel deters deviations from collusive output levels by threatening to produce at cournot quantities for a period of fixed duration whenever the market price falls below some trigger price in this model firms can observe only their own production level and a common market price the market demand curve is assumed to have a stochastic component so that an unexpectedly low price may signal either deviations from collusive output levels or a downward demand shock

dynamic bargaining with transaction costs a buyer and seller alternate making offers until an offer is accepted or someone terminates negotiations the seller s valuation is common knowledge but the buyer s valuation is known only by the buyer impatience to reach an agreement comes from two sources the traders discount future payoffs and there are transaction costs of bargaining equilibrium behavior involves either immediate trade delayed trade or immediate termination depending on the size of the gains from trade and the relative bargaining costs this contrasts with the pure discounting model where termination never occurs and the pure transaction cost model where delayed trade never occurs

equilibria of collective action in different distributions of protest thresholds to understand why political protests show the effects of tipping over into revolution effects that stun observers participants and even the opposition or incumbent government scholars have constructed threshold models of revolt to illustrate that an important feature of collective rebellion is people deciding to join based on knowing how many others have already participated i conduct equilibrium analyses to observe the effects of normal bimodal and skewed distributions of thresholds upon the dynamics of opposition movements the results shed some light on how various patterns of domestic confrontation affect the outcome of collective dissent

an experiment on spatial competition with endogenous pricing hotelling s 1929 principle of minimum differentiation and the alternative prediction that firms will maximally differentiate from their rivals in order to relax price competition have not been explicitly tested so far we report results from experimental spatial duopolies designed to address this issue the levels of product differentiation observed are systematically lower than predicted in equilibrium under risk neutrality and compatible with risk aversion the observed prices are consistent with collusion attempts our main findings are robust to variations in three experimental conditions automated vs human market sharing rule for ties individual vs collective decision making and even vs odd number of locations

cyclical fluctuations in strike durations canadian data on strikes between 1946 and 1983 are used to estimate linear regression models for the logarithm of completed duration a thorough investigation of the influence of the business cycle reveals strong support for the hypothesis that strike durations are countercyclical the cyclical effect is shown to be robust to both the choice of cyclical variable and the econometric specification and the magnitude of the effect is quite substantial experimentation with different representations of the cycle reveals that it is difficult to improve on a simple formulation involving a single continuous variable

land acquisition for industrialization and compensation of displaced farmers this paper addresses the question of how farmers displaced by acquisition of agricultural land for the purpose of industrialization ought to be compensated prior to acquisition the farmers are leasing in land from a private owner or local government with a legally mandated sharecropping contract compensation rules affect the decision of the landlord to sell the land ex post to an industrial developer and ex ante incentives of tenants and landlord to make specific investments in agricultural productivity efficiency considerations are shown to require farmers be over compensated in the event of conversion

information sharing and tacit collusion in laboratory duopoly markets i introduction economists have long believed that enhanced information about demand conditions or rival actions can play an important role in facilitating collusion for example because it simplifies detection of chiselers stigler 1964 an extensive theoretical literature examines the incentives for non cooperative firms to share information through a trade association about some uncertain parameter see sakai 1990 1991 for a survey firms in these models may cooperate by sharing information in the trade association even though most authors assume that the firms choose non cooperative strategies in the product market under these conditions vives 1984 shows that with demand uncertainty substitute goods and quantity competition each firm s dominant strategy is to conceal information from its rivals therefore under these conditions non cooperative firms will not find it in their interests to form an information sharing arrangement such as a trade association because non cooperative firms should not wish to share information clarke 1983 392 concludes that information pooling mechanisms like trade associations can be considered prima facie evidence that firms are illegally cooperating to restrict output however kirby 1988 shows that non cooperative firms will want to share information if cost functions are sufficiently quadratic moreover hviid 1989 demonstrates that non cooperative firms will prefer to share information if they are sufficiently risk averse these models typically assume that firms interact once and identify the static subgame perfect nash equilibrium ne of the two stage information sharing game this is sensible when the goal is to focus on a narrow set of non cooperative equilibria because the set of non cooperative equilibria becomes very large in these models in the more complex repeated game however repeated interaction between competing firms seems more relevant for empirical applications especially for providing policy insight for trade associations that permit long term interactions among firms unfortunately empirical work in this area based on field data is challenging because the information different decision makers possess and the corresponding residual uncertainty they face are typically difficult to identify this paper uses a different empirical approach we use a series of laboratory duopoly markets to examine the impact of demand uncertainty on sellers output choices specifically we examine the importance of information sharing in facilitating tacit collusion under conditions of demand uncertainty 1 our experiment employs repeated interaction between fixed pairs of subjects trading the ability to directly test the static models for a more realistic policy relevant study of outcomes in the repeated game 2 our results indicate the extent to which results from static theory carry over to the repeated environment and can help guide future theory for dynamic oligopoly models of information sharing the experiment includes four distinct treatment conditions in the primary treatment sellers face uncertain demand but can eliminate uncertainty through voluntary mutual information sharing three control treatments identify the reasons for voluntary information sharing and determine if it leads to more collusive outcomes the first two control treatments eliminate sellers information sharing opportunities in the first control treatment sellers always remain uncertain about demand when choosing output while in the second control treatment sellers always have perfect demand information we refer to these control treatments respectively as forced no sharing and forced sharing throughout the paper the third control treatment sharply reduces collusion incentives by truncating demand while still allowing voluntary information transmission we refer to this control treatment as the truncated demand treatment the results briefly stated are as follows

corporate taxation incumbency advantage and entry abstract it is the purpose of this paper to show that corporation tax may affect industrial structure analyzing the effects of corporation tax we demonstrate that it tends to favour incumbents over entrants we further show that the effect of this advantage on an incumbent s output depends on his profit or loss history an incumbent with a past profit is likely to produce a greater output thereby partially or fully crowding out an entrant s output in contrast an incumbent with a past loss is more likely to produce a smaller output making entry easier

the political economy of privatization in developing countries abstract privatization in ldcs refers here to the sale or leasing of assets in which the state has a majority interest and the contracting out of publicly provided services privatization is in part a response to the need for fiscal austerity its pace and scope will be determined importantly by the way in which the public sector was built privatization is easier to implement than has been supposed because its austerity and equity costs are relatively small compared to those of broader structural adjustment processes in which it is commonly situated however the payoffs from privatization are relatively small too there is high opportunity cost in time and management for the complicated task of preparing public assets for sale capital market thinness characterizes ldcs and popular capitalism does not appear to be a realistic option in ldcs privatization is likely to be entangled in regional and ethnic conflicts these may be as consequential for formulating and implementing programs as are the critical coalitions that form between economic sectors such as capital and labor or importers and exporters we believe that privatization is not a linear or ineluctable process indeed many privatizations may be implemented in the absence of a commitment to market forces but where the state seeks to redefine the instruments and scope of its interventionism

an information rationale for the power of special interests political decisions are often biased in favor of special interests at the expense of the general public and they are frequently inefficient in the sense that the losses incurred by the majority exceed the gains enjoyed by the minority this article explains the bias in terms of information asymmetries and the free rider problem first incumbents increase their reelection prospects by biasing policy toward groups that are better able to monitor their activities second because smaller groups are better able to overcome the free rider problem of costly monitoring policy will be biased in their favor third the effect of asymmetric monitoring on voter welfare is ambiguous the inefficiencies created by the policy bias are offset by a positively valued selection bias incumbents of above average quality are more likely to survive voter scrutiny than are low quality types

a letter to the editor on wage bargaining abstract the rubinstein perfect information alternating offers bargaining model is problematic when applied to wage negotiations a strike or any other industrial action is not an automatic consequence of a delay in reaching an agreement because production can continue normally also when negotiations take place this paper extends the rubinstein model to incorporate the choice of calling a strike and it is shown that in this model there is no longer a unique subgame perfect equilibrium and that strikes with a length in real time can occur in equilibrium

on the formation of industry lobby groups abstract this paper provides a step towards a more complete theory of lobbying extending the menu auction model of grossman and helpman grossman g m helpman e 1994 american economic review 84 833 850 a new explanation is proposed for why more concentrated industries more easily overcome the free rider problem inherent in political collective action instead of focusing on transactions costs as olson olson m 1965 the logic of collective action harvard university press cambridge ma we show that more collusive industries with higher collusive profits have a greater incentive to form lobby groups and to contribute to industry lobbying moreover more polluting industries also have a greater incentive to form and contribute to a lobby group

campaign contributions and access an important and pervasive view of campaign contributions is that they are given to promote access to successful candidates under circumstances when such access would not ordinarily be given in this story access is valuable as it offers groups the opportunity to influence legislative decisions through the provision of policy relevant information under complete information regarding donors policy preferences i argue that this model predicts a negative relationship between contributions and the extent to which the groups and the recipient legislators preferences are similar however one of the more robust empirical findings in the literature is that this relationship is positive relaxing the informational assumption on donors preferences i reexamine the access story with a model in which campaign contributions can act as signals of policy preference and the informational value of access to any agent is endogenous

market transparency and market structure the livestock mandatory reporting act of 1999 the premise of the livestock mandatory reporting act of 1999 is that enhanced transparency promotes competition this article provides a theoretical study of the consequences of such transparency for the structure conduct and performance of the livestock industry i conclude that the usefulness of the act to the livestock industry may not be in the value of reported information to feeders as the supporters of the act claim rather by forcing packers to pool information at negligible marginal cost the act may foster more competitive conduct in the procurement of livestock copyright 2003 oxford university press

public protests and policy making technological advances and the development of social media have made petitions public protests and other form of spontaneous activism increasingly common tools for individuals to influence decision makers to study these phenomena in this article i present a theory of petitions and public protests that explores their limits as mechanisms to aggregate information the key assumption is that valuable information is dispersed among citizens through petitions and protests citizens can signal their private information to the policy maker who can then choose to use it or not i first show that if citizens individual signals are not sufficiently precise information aggregation is impossible no matter how large is the population of informed citizens even if the conflict with the policy maker is small i then characterize the conditions on conflict and the signal structure that guarantee information aggregation when these conditions are satisfied i show that full information aggregation is possible as the population grows to infinity when they are not satisfied i show that information aggregation may still be possible if social media are available

protests and trust in the state evidence from african countries this paper provides empirical evidence that after protests citizens substantially revise their views on the current leader but also their trust in the country s institutions the empirical strategy exploits variation in the timing of an individual level survey and the proximity to social protests in 13 african countries first we find that trust in political leaders strongly and abruptly decreases after protests second trust in the country monitoring institutions plunges as well both effects are much stronger when protests are repressed by the government as no signs of distrust are recorded even a couple of days before the social conflicts protests can be interpreted as sudden signals sent on a leaders actions from which citizens extract information on their country fundamentals

multidimensional separating equilibria and moral hazard an empirical study of national football league contract negotiations this paper empirically tests for a multidimensional separating equilibrium in contract negotiations and tests for evidence of the moral hazard inherent in many contracts using contract and performance data on players drafted into the national football league from 1986 through 1991 we find evidence that players use delay to agreement and incentive clauses to reveal their private information during contract negotiations in addition our empirical tests of the moral hazard issue indicate that a player s effort level is influenced by the structure of his contract

inequality lobbying and resource allocation this paper describes how wealth inequality may distort public resource allocation a government seeks to allocate limited resources to productive sectors but sectoral productivity is privately known by agents with vested interests in those sectors they lobby the government for preferential treatment the government even if it honestly seeks to maximize economic efficiency may be confounded by the possibility that both high wealth and true economic desirability create loud lobbies broadly speaking both poorer economies and unequal economies display greater public misallocation the paper warns against the conventional wisdom that this is so because such governments are more corrupt jel d72 d78 d82 016 in this paper we propose a particular channel through which wealth inequality distorts the resource allocation process our analysis rests on four premises

duopoly information equilibrium cournot and bertrand abstract in a duopoly model where firms have private information about an uncertain linear demand it is shown that if the goods are substitutes not to share information is a dominant strategy for each firm in bertrand cournot competition if the goods are complements the result is reversed furthermore the following welfare results are obtained 1 i with substitutes in cournot competition the market outcome is never optimal with respect to information sharing but it may be optimal in bertrand competition if the products are good substitutes with complements the market outcome is always optimal 2 ii bertrand competition is more efficient than cournot competition 3 iii the private value of information to the firms is always positive but the social value of information is positive in cournot and negative in bertrand competition

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

the determinants of strike incidence and severity a micro level study this paper investigates the determinants of strike incidence and severity during labor contract negotiations the author develops a model that considers the forces influencing both unions willingness to strike and employers willingness to take a strike and estimates it using data describing 1 050 negotiations in u s manufacturing during the 1971 80 period the results indicate that strike incidence is influenced by the gender composition of the labor force demand fluctuations in the product market location in a right to work state the number of workers in the bargaining unit union density in the industry and the extent to which wages kept pace with inflation over the prior contract period on the other hand neither the local unemployment rate when negotiations began nor the inflation rate over the term of the expiring contract influenced strike incidence or severity in this sample

an introduction to applicable game theory this paper offers an introduction to game theory for applied economists i try to give simple definitions and intuitive examples of the basic kinds of games and their solution concepts there are four kinds of games static or dynamic and complete or incomplete information complete information means there is no private information the corresponding solution concepts are nash equilibrium in static games of complete information backwards induction or subgame perfect nash equilibrium in dynamic games of complete information bayesian nash equilibrium in static games with incomplete information and perfect bayesian or sequential equilibrium in dynamic games with incomplete information the main theme of the paper is that these solution concepts are closely linked as we consider progressively richer games we progressively strengthen the solution concept to rule out implausible equilibria in the richer games that would survive if we applied solution concepts available for simpler games in each case the stronger solution concept differs from the weaker concept only for the richer games not for the simpler games

privatization and efficiency from principals and agents to political economy ad i pavia abstract we survey the theoretical literature on privatization and efficiency by tracing its evolution from the applications of agency theory to recent contributions in the field of political economy the former extend the theory of regulation with incomplete information to address privatization issues comparing state owned enterprises with private regulated firms the benefits of privatization may derive either from the constraints it places on malevolent agents or from the impossibility of commitment by a benevolent government because of incomplete contracts contributions dealing with political economy issues separate privatization from restructuring decisions they either explore bargaining between managers and politicians or analyse the impact of privatization shaped by political preferences on efficiency the theoretical results regarding the relation between privatization and efficiency do not lead to any definitive conclusion privatization may increase productive efficiency when restructuring takes place whereas its effects on allocative efficiency still remain uncertain

strategic transmission of costly information it is ofren the case that an individual s decision is at least partly based on information received from another and when the agents payoffs depend on both the former s decision and on the latter s information there is an incentive for the informed individual to attempt to bias the decision maker s decision in his or her favor by strategically manipulating the information transmitted in a seminal paper crawford and sobel 1982 hereafter c s study such strategic information transmission in the context of an abstract sender receiver game variants of the crawford and sobel model have been applied widely and as the application varies so often does the interpretation of type in some cases type refers to a preference parameter given by nature as for example in bargaining theory e g farrell and gibbons 1989 matthews 1989 whereas in other settings for instance legislative decision making or expert testimony type refers to more or less technical information concerning how decisions map into final consequences and as such is acquired information e g gilligan and krehbiel 1987 milgrom and roberts 1986 when the information has to be acquired it is natural to suppose the acquisition is costly for otherwise there is no reason why such information is asymmetrically distributed so long as the receiver can observe surely or at least accurately infer whether the sender is informed and so long as messages are cheap talk there is no issue here for strategic information transmission save whether to become informed at all however there are many circumstances when it is inappropri ate to assume the receiver has such knowledge one possibility is that a receiver may know that a sender has some relevant informa tion but be uncertain of the quality of this information a second perhaps more important possibility is that a receiver is unable to tell whether a potential sender is uninformed inter alia this problem constitutes the rationale for ignorance of the law being inadmissible as a legal defense were it admissible then informed miscreants would mimic uninformed transgressors leads voters to be skeptical of politicians claiming ignorance of illegal arms deals and makes the sec sensitive to problems in distinguishing insider trading from legitimate good judgement so there is an intrinsic asymmetry in that it is generally possible for say senders to verify possession of at least some information but it is typically prohibitively difficult to verify any lack of knowledge

striking for a bargain between two completely informed agents this paper models the wage contract negotiation procedure between a union and a firm as a sequential bargaining process in which the union must decide in each period whether or not to strike for the duration of that period we show that there exist subgame perfect equilibria in which the union engages in several periods of strikes prior to reaching a final agreement although both parties are completely rational and fully informed this has implications for other inefficient phenomena such as tariff wars debt negotiations and wars in general we characterize the set of equilibria show that strikes can occur in real time and discuss extensions of the model such as lockouts and the possibility of multiple recontracting opportunities copyright 1991 by american economic association

voting as communicating mandates multiple candidates and the signaling voter s curse abstract in this spatial model of common value elections votes convey citizens private opinions regarding which policies are socially optimal and the winning candidate utilizes this information in choosing policy in equilibrium large margins of victory convey mandates for candidates to make bold policy changes to communicate extreme policy views citizens support extreme parties that may be unlikely to win office to convey moderate views citizens deliberately abstain from voting thereby avoiding the signaling voter s curse of encouraging overextremism in large elections mandates can identify the optimal policy from an entire continuum thereby greatly strengthening condorcet s 1785 classic jury theorem behavioral patterns are consistent with otherwise puzzling empirical features of elections and can also apply to other political activities such as public protests or writing letters to elected officials

collective action with uncertain payoffs coordination public signals and punishment dilemmas how can one analyze collective action in protests or revolutions when individuals are uncertain about the relative payoffs of the status quo and revolution we model a calculus of protest of individuals who must either submit to the status quo or support revolt based only on personal information about their payoffs in deciding whether to revolt the citizen must infer both the benefit of successful revolution and the likely actions of other citizens we characterize conditions under which payoff uncertainty overturns conventional wisdom a when a citizen is too willing to revolt he reduces the incentives of others to revolt b less accurate information about the value of revolution can make revolt more likely c public signals from other citizens can reduce the likelihood of revolt d harsher punishment can increase the incidence of punishment and e the incidence of protest can be positively correlated with that of repression

informational limits to democratic public policy the jury theorem yardstick competition and ignorance condorcet s jury theorem provides a possible explanation for the success of democracies relative to other forms of government in its modern form the jury theorem predicts that majority decisions are well informed because they are based upon far more information than possessed by any single individual on the other hand it is evident that democratic politicians and policies are not always as good as the jury theorem implies they should be

bargaining theory inflation and cyclical strike activity in manufacturing this paper presents a theoretical and empirical analysis of cyclical movements in strike activity the first part of the paper develops a bargaining model that demonstrates the crucial role of limi

voting as communicating this paper develops a model where voters trade off two different motives when deciding how to vote they care about current decision making they are strategic but they also care about communicating their views about their most preferred candidate so as to influence future elections by influencing other voters opinion and or party positioning in effect voters in this model are intermediate between strategic and sincere voters of conventional models in elections with more than 2 candidates this allows us to better investigate the relative efficiency of various electoral systems our main conclusion is that since voting is used as a communication device electoral systems should be designed to facilitate efficient communication e g by opting for 2 round systems rather than 1 round systems

duopolists don t wish to share information abstract this paper shows that in a full bayes cournot equilibrium duopolists would prefer to keep their market information private rather than share it with their opponent this is in contrast to a fulfilled expectations bayes cournot equilibrium where firms are indifferent to sharing

how strong is the macroeconomic case for downward real wage rigidity we explore the existence of downward real wage rigidity drwr at the industry level based on data from 19 oecd countries for the period 1973 1999 the results show that drwr compresses the distributions of industry wage changes overall as well as for specific geographical regions and time periods but there are not many real wage cuts that are prevented more important however drwr attenuates larger real wage cuts thus leading to higher real wages there is stronger evidence for downward nominal wage rigidity than for drwr real wage cuts are less prevalent in countries with strict employment protection legislation and high union density

information cascades and revolutionary regime transitions we combine acemoglu and robinson s model of the economic origins of democracy with lohmann s model of political mass protest this allows us to analyse the economic causes of political regime change based on the microfoundations of revolution we are able to derive conditions under which democracy arises peacefully when it occurs only after a revolution and when oligarchy persists we model these possibilities in a world of asymmetric information where information cascades are possible and where these cascades may involve errors in the sense that they make everyone worse off

risk averse duopolists and voluntary information transmission this paper considers the incentives for risk averse firms to share their private information they show that the introduction of risk aversion in some cases reverses the result in the literature that no such incentives exist further they show that the output level of risk averse cournot duopolists is increasing in the quality of their private information and decreasing in their perception of risk copyright 1989 by blackwell publishing ltd

corrective tax and subsidy policies in economies with bertrand competition abstract this paper shows how we can correct market failure due to imperfect competition by using taxes and subsidies the analysis is carried out at the general equilibrium level and the importance of objective demand curves is stressed the main conclusions are first it is possible to tax the economy back to the walrasian equilibrium by using linear taxes and subsidies second the welfare theorem holds in an imperfectly competitive economy with corrective taxes and subsidies third a competitive equilibrium can also be achieved by the use of ad valorem taxes and specific output subsidies

strategic bargaining models and interpretation of strike data attrition screening and signalling models of strategic bargaining are characterized in terms of their predictions about the incidence mean duration and settlement rates of strikes and the terms of wage settlements these predictions are compared with the general features observed in empirical studies of strikes in canada and the united states conclusions are drawn about the types of models capable of generating these features and about the conformity of the models to the evidence methods are described for computing the numerical examples used to illustrate the models

when the squeakiest wheel gets the most oil exploiting one s nuisance power abstract in this paper a lobby group or union may influence public policy because it is able via a costly signal such as a boycott or a strike to negatively impact the image of decision makers the competence of a government is measured by its ability to do a lot with only a little money voters receive through observing the level of public output only a noisy signal of government s quality so that the lobby groups which are better informed may transmit to them more precise information about it we show that when unions are unbiased i e have no hostility against or sympathy for the incumbent government strikes may occur only when the government is bad consequently a strike in this case acts as a clear though costly signal to the public of an incompetent government when some or all unions or lobby groups are biased against the incumbent government we show that the possibility of strikes may distort the budget allocation away from the efficient one bad governments have a tendency to favor their political enemies while good governments favor their political enemies only when they are not overly biased

polarization and inefficient policies of the economy in this case the costs of producing a public good the parties each propose a policy an election is held and the policy of the winning party is implemented voters and parties care about the level of the public good and costs two kinds of sequential equilibria exist revealing where voters learn the true costs and the implemented policy adjusts to costs and non revealing if parties preferences are polarized only non revealing equilibria fulfill a refinement criterion like the intuitive criterion if they are alike only revealing equilibria fulfill this criterion thus less political polarization improves information revelation in electoral democracies policy motivated parties are likely to be better informed about the functioning of the economy than are voters this paper presents a model where two parties but not voters are informed about the cost of producing a public good we study whether an electoral democracy leads to efficient production of the public good given this asymmetry of information in particular under which circumstances will the implemented policy the level of the public good reflect actual costs the main result is that the policy will reflect costs if and only if at least one of the parties has preferences which are sufficiently similar to the median voter s in this sense polarization leads to inefficiency the public good can be for instance infrastructure medicare or military services both a continuum of voters and the parties have preferences over the amount of the good that is provided by the government the preferences of the two parties are situated on each side of those of the median voter the costs of providing the good are not precisely known to the voters who only know the distribution of costs and that they will pay for these costs as taxpayers on the other hand the parties know the costs

collusion among asymmetric firms the case of different discount factors abstract this study investigates collusive behavior among asymmetric firms for this purpose we develop a selection criterion for deriving a unique collusive outcome and apply it to the case when firms have different discount factors our analysis reveals that for collusion to be self enforcing it is unnecessary that all firms have sufficiently high discount factors but rather only that firms on average have a sufficiently long run view the optimal collusive outcome entails a strict ordering of output quotas in which firms with relatively low discount factors receive a disproportionate share of market demand as found in the case of a common discount factor a fall in a firm s discount factor reduces the likelihood of successful collusion this effect reduces firm profits on the other hand in the event that firms can collude a lowering of a firm s discount factor increases its output quota so that its profits rise

resistance redistribution and investor friendliness abstract poor communities sometimes resist private investment and destroy economic surplus even if the government has the willingness and ability to redistribute we interpret such acts of resistance as demands for redistribution destruction contains credible information about how the affected group values surplus and such information is used by the government in implementing the optimal redistribution policy the extent of destruction is increasing in the extent of political marginalization of the affected group resistance not only destroys economic surplus it also mutes the investor s incentives to create surplus the government uses a tax subsidy on the investor to maximize weighted social surplus and we show that the possibility of destruction may force the government to be too soft in its negotiations with the investor we discuss several policy instruments that have the potential to improve welfare these include compensation floor for the affected group legal or financial protection for the investor and licensing fees for the investor

harmonization and side payments in political cooperation for two districts or countries that try to internalize externalities i analyze a bargaining game under private information i derive conditions for when it is efficient with uniform policies across regions with and without side payments and when it is efficient to prohibit side payments in the negotiations while policy differentiation and side payments allow the policy to better reflect local conditions they create conflicts between the regions and thus delay the results also describe when political centralization outperforms decentralized cooperation and they provide a theoretical foundation for the controversial uniformity assumption traditionally used by the fiscal federalism literature

campaign advertising and voter welfare this paper investigates the role of campaign advertising and the opportunity of legal restrictions on it an electoral race is modeled as a signalling game with three classes of players many voters two candidates and one interest group the group has non verifiable insider information on the candidates quality and on the basis of this information offers a contribution to each candidate in exchange for a favorable policy position candidates spend the contributions they receive on non directly informative advertising this paper shows that 1 a separating equilibrium exists in which the group contributes to a candidate only if the insider information about that candidate is positive 2 although voters are fully rational a ban on campaign advertising can be welfare improving and 3 split contributions may arise in equilibrium and if they arise too often they are detrimental to voters

general equilibrium tax incidence under imperfect competition a quantity setting supergame analysis the incidence of various taxes is analyzed in a model with competitive and oligopolistic sectors friedman s grim trigger strategies support collusion with firms producing output to maximize joint profits subject to the constraint that no firm desires to cheat the sustainable level of output depends on the capitalized value of future retaliation therefore tax induced changes in the net return to capital the discount rate affect the output mix through their impact on the sustainability of collusion this collusive pricing effect is isolated and analyzed one result is that a general factor tax on capital but not labor is shifted

an investigation into the determinants of u s strike activity this paper outlines the steps involved in constructing a new panel dataset of u s contract negotiations and strike activity this data set has a much broader coverage of firms and unions than micro data sets analyzed to date key findings include the discovery that the variability and not the level of firm profitability affects the probability of a strike personal characteristics of the union workforce also emerge as key determinants of strike activity finally strikes are found to be more likely when the local labor market is tight but less likely when the industry labor market is tight copyright 1986 by american economic association

uneven growth a framework for research in development economics the textbook paradigm of economy wide development rests on the premise of balanced growth that is on the presumption that all sectors will grow in unison over time as a country gets richer this view has served us reasonably well in some circumstances but is not particularly useful for accounts of modern under development in many developing countries economic growth has been fundamentally uneven software development the outsourcing of services sectoral technological change quick compositional shifts between agriculture and other sectors the rise of particular exports special economic zones and so on this paper will discuss both the sources of uneven growth and its implications with greater emphasis on the latter the paper will argue that much of the distributional issues or the reactions to globalization that we see in modern developing societies can be viewed as reactions to a growth process that is fundamentally uneven and is indeed perceived as such

wealth constraints lobbying and the efficiency of public allocation abstract in esteban and ray 1999 inequality public allocation and development mimeo we formalize a model in which individuals lobby before the government in order to benefit from some productivity enhancing government action infrastructures direct subsidies permissions in short the government honestly tries to allocate these permissions to the agents that will make the best use of them as revealed by the intensity of their lobbying if the marginal cost of resources varies with wealth the amount of information transmitted through lobbying will depend on the degree of inequality in this paper we summarize the main approach and examine the special case of equal wealth we show that the nature of signaling equilibria is critically affected by per capita wealth

strategic delay in bargaining this paper analyses a bargaining model with incomplete information in which the time between offers is an endogenous strategic variable we find equilibria involving a delay to agreement that is due to the use of strategic time delay by bargainers to signal their relative strength under some specifications of the parameters delay is present in the unique sequential equilibrium whose beliefs satisfy one intuitive restriction this delay does not vanish as the minimal time between offers becomes small