how should commodities be taxed market structure product heterogeneity and the optimal structure of commodity taxes abstract this paper is concerned with the form in which commodity taxes are best imposed and particularly with the appropriate balance between specific and ad valorem components this neglected issue is of policy importance in relation to the harmonization of tax structures within the eec and of theoretical interest as a point of contact between optimal tax theory and models of non price competition the roles of the two taxes as purely corrective devices under a variety of market forms are established and discussed the analysis suggests that heavily taxed commodities should normally be subject to high specific rather than high ad valorem taxes

reputation with equal discounting in repeated games with strictly conflicting interests we analyze reputation effects in two player repeated games of strictly conflicting interests in such games player 1 has a commitment action such that a best reply to it gives player 1 the highest individually rational payoff and player 2 the minmax payoff players have equal discount factors with positive probability player 1 is a type who chooses the commitment action after every history we show that player 1 s payoff converges to the maximally feasible payoff when the discount factor converges to one this contrasts with failures of reputation effects for equal discount factors that have been demonstrated in the literature journal of economic literature classification number c71

reputation and experimentation in repeated games with two long run players this paper considers reputation effects in a repeated game between two long run players one of whom is relatively patient and may be committed to a fixed strategy which punishes the opponent for increasingly long periods whenever inappropriate actions are taken by following this commitment strategy the more patient player can induce a sufficiently patient opponent to experiment to see whether the commitment strategy is also being followed off the equilibrium path this can guarantee the more patient player in any nash equilibrium a payoff close to the highest feasible payoff consistent with the individual rationality of the other player for an arbitrary degree of patience of the less patient player a weaker result is established the more patient player is guaranteed an average equilibrium payoff close to the static stackelberg payoff this latter result generalizes that of schmidt 1993 who established the same result for the restricted class of games of conflicting interests

a two sided reputation result with long run players abstract we establish reputation results under two sided incomplete information for a class of repeated games we consider a repeated game that satisfies the assumptions of either atakan and ekmekci 2012 3 or cripps et al 2005 6 and we assume that both players are stackelberg types with positive probability if the stage game is not a common interest game then equilibrium play converges to the unique equilibrium of a continuous time war of attrition as the stage game is repeated arbitrarily frequently alternatively if the stage game is a common interest game then the players equilibrium payoffs converge to their highest payoffs as the stage game is repeated arbitrarily frequently

reputation and dynamic stackelberg leadership in infinitely repeated games abstract the paper studies a repeated game in which a long run player without discounting faces another long run player with strict discounting the game is perturbed so that there is uncertainty in the patient player s strategy choice she may be a rational player but she may also be one of many irrational types who are committed to various repeated game strategies the rational patient player s equilibrium payoff in this perturbed game is analyzed in particular it is shown that the lower bound on her payoff in the set of extensive form trembling hand perfect equilibria is given by her stackelberg payoff in a dynamics sense journal of economic literature classification numbers c72 d82

arms races and negotiations two players simultaneously decide whether or not to acquire new weapons in an arms race game each player s type determines his propensity to arm types are private information and are independently drawn from a continuous distribution with probability close to one the best outcome for each player is for neither to acquire new weapons although each prefers to acquire new weapons if he thinks the opponent will there is a small probability that a player is a dominant strategy type who always prefers to acquire new weapons we find conditions under which the unique bayesian nash equilibrium involves an arms race with probability one however if the probability that a player is a dominant strategy type is sufficiently small then there is an equilibrium of the cheap talk extension of the game where the probability of an arms race is close to zero copyright 2004 wiley blackwell

the efficiency of indirect taxes under imperfect competition abstract this paper considers the relative efficiency of ad valorem and unit taxes in imperfectly competitive markets we provide a simple proof that ad valorem taxes are welfare superior to unit taxes in the short run when production costs are identical across firms the proof covers differentiated products and a wide range of market conduct cost asymmetries strengthen the case for ad valorem taxation under cournot competition but unit taxation may be welfare superior under bertrand competition with product differentiation ad valorem taxation is superior with free entry under cournot competition but not necessarily under price competition when consumers value variety

the induced innovation hypothesis and u s public agricultural research applicability of the induced innovation hypothesis that a change in relative input prices induces innovation to economize use of the increasingly expensive input hicks 1932 is examined for u s public agricultural research a reduced form test is developed using input prices from the agricultural production sector expenditures from the public research sector aimed at developing new technology to save specific agricultural inputs and variables to control for innovation marginal cost differences and nonhomotheticity unlike recent demand side studies that soundly reject the induced innovation hypothesis for agriculture support for the hypothesis is found for several input pairings through these tests of public agricultural research using state level panel data

stackelberg and marshall this paper advocates a generalized n firm stackelberg model as a plausible testable alternative description of oligopoly a pure strategy equilibrium must exist for this model the main result is that efficiency obtains in the limit as the scale of each firm is shrunk relative to demand this is demonstrated for the case of u shaped average cost and also for that of natural monopoly copyright 1990 by american economic association

reputation and perfection in repeated common interest games abstract we consider a wide class of repeated common interest games perturbed with one sided incomplete information one player the informed player might be a commitment type playing the pareto dominant action as discounting which is assumed to be symmetric and the prior probability of the commitment type go to zero it is shown that the informed player can be held close to her minmax payoff even when perfection is imposed on the equilibrium journal of economic literature classification numbers c73 d83

reputation and imperfect information abstract a common observation in the informal literature of economics and elsewhere is that is multistage games players may seek early in the game to acquire a reputation for being tough or benevolent or something else but this phenomenon is not observed in some formal game theoretic analyses of finite games such as selten s finitely repeated chain store game or in the finitely repeated prisoners dilemma we reexamine selten s model adding to it a small amount of imperfect or incomplete information about players payoffs and we find that this addition is sufficient to give rise to the reputation effect that one intuitively expects

unique equilibrium in a model of self fulfilling currency attacks even though self fulfilling currency attacks lead to multiple equilibria when fundamentals are common knowledge we demonstrate the uniqueness of equilibrium when speculators face a small amount of noise in their signals about the fundamentals this unique equilibrium depends not only on the fundamentals but also on financial variables such as the quantity of hot money in circulation and the costs of speculative trading in contrast to multiple equilibrium models our model allows analysis of policy proposals directed at curtailing currency attacks

reputation in long run relationships we model a long run relationship as an infinitely repeated game played by two equally patient agents in each period the agents play an extensive form stage game of perfect information with either locally non conflicting interests or strictly conflicting interests there is incomplete information about the type of player 1 while player 2 s type is commonly known we show that a sufficiently patient player 1 can leverage player 2 s uncertainty about his type to secure his highest pay off compatible with player 2 s individual rationality in any perfect bayesian equilibrium of the repeated game copyright 2012 oxford university press

bargaining and reputation the paper develops a reputation based theory of bargaining the idea is to investigate and highlight the influence of bargaining postures on bargaining outcomes a complete information bargaining model a la rubinstein is amended to accommodate irrational types who are obstinate and indeed for tractability assumed to be completely inflexible in their offers and demands a strong independence of procedures result is derived after initial postures have been adopted the bargaining outcome is independent of the fine details of the bargaining protocol so long as both players have the opportunity to make offers frequently the latter analysis yields a unique continuous time limit with a war of attrition structure in the continuous time game equilibrium is unique and entails delay consequently inefficiency the equilibrium outcome reflects the combined influence of the rates of time preference of the players and the ex ante probabilities of different irrational types as the probability of irrationality goes to zero delay and inefficiency disappear furthermore if there is a rich set of types for both agents the limit equilibrium payoffs are inversely proportional to their rates of time preference

why are stabilizations delayed when a stabilization has significant distributional implications e g tax increases to eliminate a large budget deficit socioeconomic groups may attempt to shift the burden of stabilization onto other groups the process leading to stabilization becomes a war of attrition each group attempting to wait the others out and stabilization occurring only when one group concedes and bears a disproportionate share of the burden the authors solve for the expected time of stabilization in a model of rational delay and relate it to several political and economic variables they motivate this approach and its results by comparison to historical and current episodes copyright 1991 by american economic association

observations on cooperation we study environments in which agents are randomly matched to play a prisoner s dilemma and each player observes a few of the partner s past actions against previous opponents we depart from the existing related literature by allowing a small fraction of the population to be commitment types the presence of committed agents destabilizes previously proposed mechanisms for sustaining cooperation we present a novel intuitive combination of strategies that sustains cooperation in various environments moreover we show that under an additional assumption of stationarity this combination of strategies is essentially the unique mechanism to support full cooperation and it is robust to various perturbations finally we extend the results to a setup in which agents also observe actions played by past opponents against the current partner and we characterize which observation structure is optimal for sustaining cooperation

a battle of the sexes game with incomplete information a battle of the sexes game with incomplete information presents two different efficiency problems coordination and maximizing ex ante expected utility by favoring a player facing high stakes communication and mediation can allow an optimal tradeoff between the two problems this paper gives 1 necessary conditions for and specification of an incentive efficient mediation mechanism and 2 necessary and sufficient conditions for mediation to be required for efficiency these conditions yield additional results concerning the necessity of privacy in communications and the superfluity of enforcement contrary to some recent studies our results demonstrate that unmediated communication is insufficient to achieve incentive efficiency an application to the theory of regulation is suggested

maintaining a reputation against a long lived opponent we consider a game between a patient player 1 and a nonmyopic but less patient opponent player 2 as usual in reputation models we suppose that the patient player s type is private information and that he may be a commitment type who is locked into playing a particular strategy we investigate the extent to which an uncommitted or normal type of patient player can exploit his less patient opponent s uncertainty to maintain a reputation for playing like a commitment type

contract negotiation and the coase conjecture a strategic foundation for renegotiation proof contracts what does contract negotiation look like when some parties hold private information and negotiation frictions are negligible this paper analyzes this question and provides a foundation for renegotiation proof contracts in this environment the model extends the framework of the coase conjecture to situations in which the quantity or quality of the good is endogenously determined and to more general environments in which preferences are nonseparable in the traded goods as frictions become negligible all equilibria converge to a unique outcome which is separating efficient and straightforward to characterize

noncooperative bargaining models of marriage in this paper we discuss some simple noncooperative models of distribution within marriage in which the equilibria are not necessarily pareto optimal in which history and culture can affect which equilibrium is realized and in which distribution may depend on whether resources are controlled by the husband or by the wife recent moves away from single decision maker models of the family have permitted economists to address distribution within marriage and cooperative bargaining models have played the central role in these moves the next step is to permit strategic interaction between family members by modeling distribution within marriage as a noncooperative game noncooperative game theory allows great flexibility in specifying the rules of the game and unlike cooperative game theory imposes few a priori restrictions on the nature of equilibrium outcomes in particular noncooperative models neither assume nor imply that all equilibria are pareto optimal

reputation and survival learning in a dynamic signalling model we consider the impact of reputation on the survival of a monopolist selling single units in discrete time periods whose quality is learned slowly if the seller learns her own quality at the same rate as customers a sufficiently bad run of luck could induce her to stop selling when she knows her quality a good seller never stops selling though at low reputations a bad seller does with some probability furthermore a seller with positive though imperfect information sells for the same number of periods whether her information is private or public we further consider the robustness of the central result when the seller s opportunities for strategic behaviour are limited

disappearance of reputations in two sided incomplete information games abstract this paper examines the sustainability of reputations in a class of games with imperfect public monitoring and two long lived players both of whom have private information about their own type and uncertainty over the types of the other player this class namely reputation games with one sided moral hazard can capture economic interactions that may involve hidden information or hidden action extending the techniques of cripps et al 2004 it is found that neither player can sustain a reputation permanently for playing a noncredible behavior in these games and the reputations disappear uniformly across all nash equilibria

predation reputation and entry deterrence abstract economists often argue that predatory practices are irrational since there exist cheaper or more certain means to gain or maintain a monopoly our gametheoretic equilibrium analysis suggests that if a firm is threatened by several potential entrants then predation may be rational against early entrants even if it is costly when viewed in isolation because it yields a reputation which deters other entrants asymmetric information plays a crucial role in our analysis since it provides the rationale for entrants to base their expectations of the firm s future behavior on its past actions the analysis also suggests methods to treat general reputational phenomena

reputation and equilibrium characterization in repeated games with conflicting interests a two person game is of conflicting interests if the strategy to which player one would most like to commit herself holds player two down to his minimax payoff suppose there is a positive prior probability that player one is a commitme nt type who will always play this strategy then player one will get a t least her commitment payoff in any nash equilibrium of the repeated game if her discount factor approaches one this result is robust against further perturbations of the informational structure and in striking contrast to the message of the folk theorem for games with incomplete information copyright 1993 by the econometric society

is more information always better a case in credit markets this paper studies the impact of behavioral and non behavioral information contained in consumer credit reports on the credit market a repeated game of incomplete information between a borrower and a sequence of lenders is considered lenders beliefs regarding the borrower s type depend on the borrower s historical loan performance and other informative signals it is established that for low beliefs strategic defaults occur in equilibrium as the borrower defaults on his loans despite having the ability to repay them further as the ancillary signals become increasingly informative of the borrower s type the range of beliefs over which strategic defaults occur expands this increase in strategic defaults highlights an unintended negative effect of allowing informative signals to influence beliefs on the upside the informative signals allow lenders to learn the borrower s type more quickly

reputation in a model of monetary policy with incomplete information abstract previous models of rules versus discretion are extended to include uncertainty about the policymaker s type when people observe low inflation they raise the possibility that the policymaker is committed to low inflation type 1 this enhancement of reputation gives the uncommitted policymaker type 2 an incentive to masquerade as the committed type in the equilibrium the policymaker of type 1 delivers surprisingly low inflation with corresponding costs to the economy over an extended interval the type 2 person mimics this outcome for awhile but shifts eventually to high inflation this high inflation is surprising initially but subsequently becomes anticipated

public trust and government betrayal abstract this study presents a simple model of government reputation in which government type cannot be directly observed by households with the variation that government type rather than being permanent follows an exogenous markov process this formulation captures three characteristics of bad policy outcomes governments which betray public trust do so erratically public trust is regained only gradually after a betrayal and governments with recent betrayals betray with higher probability than other governments

commodity taxation and imperfect competition a note on the effects of entry abstract this paper looks at the effects of allowing the number of firms to vary in seade s model of oligopoly and taxation we show that the normative and positive consequences of a specific commodity tax are affected by entry in significant ways

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

reputation and equilibrium selection in games with a patient player a single long run player plays a simultaneous move stage game against a sequence of opponents who play only once but observe all previous play let the stackelberg strategy be the pure strategy to which the long run player would most like to commit himself if there is positive prior probability that the long run player will always play the stackelberg strategy then his payoff in any nash equilibrium exceeds a bound that converges to the stackelberg payoff as his discount factor approaches one when the stage game is not simultaneous move this result must be modified to account for the possibility that distinct strategies of the long run player are observationally equivalent

reputation in the long run with imperfect monitoring abstract we study an infinitely repeated game where two players with equal discount factors play a simultaneous move stage game player one monitors the stage game actions of player two imperfectly while player two monitors the pure stage game actions of player one perfectly player one s type is private information and he may be a commitment type drawn from a countable set of commitment types who is locked into playing a particular strategy under a full support assumption on the monitoring structure we prove a reputation result for stage games with a strong stackelberg action if there is positive probability that player one is a particular type whose commitment payoff is equal to player one s highest payoff consistent with the players individual rationality then a patient player one secures this type s commitment payoff in any bayes nash equilibrium of the repeated game in contrast if the type s commitment payoff is strictly less than player one s highest payoff consistent with the players individual rationality then the worst perfect bayesian equilibrium payoff for a patient player one is equal to his minimax payoff

indeterminacy of reputation effects in repeated games with contracts abstract we study whether allowing players to sign binding contracts governing future play leads to reputation effects in repeated games with long run players we proceed by extending the analysis of abreu and pearce 2007 by allowing for the possibility that different behavioral types may not be immediately distinguishable from each other given any prior over behavioral types we construct a modified prior with the same total weight on behavioral types and a larger support under which almost all efficient feasible and individually rational payoffs are attainable in perfect bayesian equilibrium thus whether reputation effects emerge in repeated games with contracts depends on details of the prior distribution over behavioral types other than its support

maintaining a reputation when strategies are imperfectly observed this paper studies reputation effects in games with a single long run player whose choice of stage game strategy is imperfectly observed by his opponents we obtain lower and upper bounds on the long run player s payoff in any nash equilibrium of the game if the long run player s stage game strategy is statistically identified by the observed outcomes then for generic payoffs the upper and lower bounds both converge as the discount factor tends to 1 to the long run player s stackelberg payoff which is the most he could obtain by publicly committing himself to any strategy