modelling the domestic and foreign tourist arrivals to tamil nadu india in recent years due to the indian federal government s and tamil nadu state government s various initiatives and promotional activities foreign and domestic tourist arrivals in tamil nadu are on the increase this article aims to model the monthly tourist arrivals foreign as well as domestic in tamil nadu for monthly time series data during the period 1998 to 2002 using univariate time series models as both time series show strong seasonal patterns we also investigate the possibility of seasonal unit roots in the domestic and foreign tourist arrivals series the results show that significant growth in domestic and foreign arrivals takes place during the months december to january growth rate for domestic tourist arrivals is positive during april and may but is negative for the foreign tourist arrivals during april and insignificant during may such information would be very useful to the tamil nadu government and the tourism industry in maximizing the usage of available tourist spot infrastructure

tourism demand forecasting models choice of appropriate variable to represent tourists cost of living abstract price is generally regarded as a major determinant of demand tourism has two price elements the cost of travel to the destination and the cost of living for tourists in the destination previous studies where econometric forecasting models have been developed for international tourism demand usually take the consumer price index in a country to be a proxy for the cost of tourism in that country owing to lack of appropriate data this article attempts to evaluate the performance of proxy variables compared with a specific tourists cost of living variable within the context of tourism demand forecasting models

repeated auctions with impatient bidders and externalities author affiliation ki eun rhee krhee kdischool ac kr acknowledgment i am grateful to kyle bagwell for providing invaluable advice and support throughout the research process i also thank michael riordan eiichi miyagawa and two anonymous referees for helpful comments 1 introductioncollusive bidding behavior has been conventionally studied in a static setup often relying on some unspecified repeated interaction story for the enforcement of a cartel 1 it is not clear however whether the results from static auctions immediately carry over to a repeated setup when bidders are impatient and the enforcement or the participation constraint is binding moreover many empirical analyses for detecting collusion rely on an explicitly repeated structure rendering a theoretical analysis of collusion in a repeated setup necessary 2 several recent theoretical developments in repeated auctions have been made by aoyagi 2003 2007 skrzypacz and hopenhayn 2004 and blume and heidhues 2006 taking standard auctions as stage games these articles present various collusive bidding schemes with asymmetric punishments that outperform the bid rotation scheme which is known to be optimal in static auctions mcafee and mcmillan 1992 this article studies collusive bidding behavior in repeated auctions among both patient and impatient bidders when the outside option of the participation constraint is endogenized because of externalities a stage game involves negative externalities among the bidders when any losing bidder is worse off if a rival wins the good than if no one wins it auctions with externalities have been introduced most notably by jehiel and moldovanu 1996 and jehiel moldovanu and stacchetti 1996 these auctions describe environments in which the outcomes of auctions affect the nature of ensuing market interactions among potential bidders a wide variety of situations in which bidders are a set of oligopoly firms competing in the same market apply to this setting for example procurement auctions for highway construction contracts studied empirically by porter and zona 1993 may qualify as repeated independent private value auctions with negative externalities except that the lowest bidder wins 3 consecutive highway lettings were distributed by the department of transportation dot to a set of oligopoly firms competing in the same industry negative externalities may arise because a firm that wins the auction may experience learning by doing which provides the winning firm with a comparative cost advantage or because the winning firm may gain a reputation that gives the firm an advantage in future private sector competition as jehiel and moldovanu 1996 and jehiel moldovanu and stacchetti 1996 discuss the issue of participation is nontrivial in auctions with externalities because the ex ante payoff a bidder expects by not participating is no longer zero as in standard auctions but is rather endogenously determined by the actions of the other bidders thus an analysis of collusive bidding behavior under both nonbinding and binding participation constraints seems especially worth studying for these auctions the main findings of this article are that i there are no bidding wars along the equilibrium path and bidders expect to receive the maximal continuation values when they are both patient and impatient when bidders are impatient the optimal collusive bidding scheme involves ii a lower threshold type above whom bidding starts when externalities are small or iii more frequent jumps i e more sorting of bidders types when externalities are large in both cases seller s ex ante profit is higher when bidders are impatient if we consider patient bidders to be the ones that are interacting in a stable market 4 results carry an empirical implication either less frequent sales or fewer bid levels in auctions that are let out in stable markets will be observed

communication in repeated games with private monitoring abstract the paper considers repeated games where each player can be observed by only a subset of the other players and where players can make public announcements about the behavior of the players they observed we address the following question what is the minimal level of observability that is required to obtain efficient outcomes the main result is that the limit set of sequential equilibrium payoffs when the discount factor tends to one contains the set of individual rational payoffs whenever each player is observed by at leasttwoother players journal of economic literatureclassification number c73

elasticities of substitution in caribbean tourism abstract this paper constructs a three level ces model and estimates the effect of real exchange rates on competition for tourism earnings elasticities of substitution are estimated first intra caribbean then among regional aggregates a worldwide and a u s market are both estimated u s tourists substitute relatively more interregionally but less intra caribbean significant effects of political violence are also captured development policy options are examined including the role of parallel tourism exchange rates and caribbean collusion

remodeling international tourism demand old theory and new evidence abstract the purpose of this study is to advance the tourism demand theory by excluding simultaneous effects of exchange rates and prices in empirical models formulating an alternative pricing modus operandi consistent with recent research in the area and demonstrating the efficacy of the use of an industrial production index ipi as a proxy for income a panel fully modified ordinary least squares fmols method is employed to estimate the inbound tourism demand for turkey study findings suggest that the inclusion of exchange rates and prices as mutually exclusive components can be misleading the ipi is not a good proxy for income and country specific coefficients need to be analyzed to accurately explain determinants of tourism demand for countries in the panel

price dispersion and incomplete learning in the long run abstract in each period a seller chooses a price and the customer for that period buys either one unit or nothing the relationship between price and purchase probability is one of two linear functions it is shown that the seller behaving optimally does not necessarily learn which function is the actual relationship since there can be a positive probability of sequences of prices converging to the price at which the two functions give the same purchase probability

a study of collusion in first price auctions this paper examines the bidding for school milk contracts in florida and texas during the 1980s in both states firms were convicted of bid rigging the data and legal evidence suggest that the cartels in the two states allocate contracts in different ways one cartel divides the market among members while the other cartel also uses side payments to compensate members for refraining from bidding we show that both forms of cartel agreements are almost optimal provided the number of contracts is sufficiently large in the auction the cartel bidder may face competition from non cartel bidders the presence of an optimal cartel induces an asymmetry in the auction the selected cartel bidder is bidding as a representative of a group and has on average a lower cost than a non cartel bidder the data support the predicted equilibrium bidding behaviour in asymmetric auctions in accordance with optimal cartels

information disclosure in auctions an experiment we report experimental results on the importance of information disclosure policy in first price sealed bid auctions interaction takes place in 10 periods according to a random matching protocol and we control the level of information feedback bidders receive after each period when bidders are informed about the losing bids in previous periods prices are higher than the theoretical prediction however when this information is not revealed the bidding becomes more competitive and the bids come close to the theoretical prediction we suggest that a signaling phenomenon may be important for explaining these results 2002 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

flows of air pollution ill health and welfare we provide a theoretical framework for measuring welfare when pollution influences economic growth by impairing health and driving up defensive medical expenditures we demonstrate the usefulness of our framework in practice by applying it to data from swedish valuation studies designed according to the accounting principles suggested here we estimate that the negative health effects of nitrogen dioxide emissions amount to 0 6 of gdp in sweden we also show that a corrective pigouvian tax should internalize the direct disutility reduced labor productivity and increased healthcare expenditures caused by pollution according to our calculations harmful health impacts alone excluding ecosystem effects justify 65 of the current swedish tax on nitrogen dioxide

the vulnerability of auctions to bidder collusion previous work has addressed the relative vulnerability of different auction schemes to collusive bidding the common wisdom is that ascending bid and second price auctions are highly susceptible to collusion we show that the details of ascending bid and second price auctions including bidder registration procedures and procedures for information revelation during the auction can be designed to completely inhibit or unintentionally facilitate certain types of collusion if auctions are designed without acknowledging the possibility of collusion then the design will ignore key features that impact the potential success of colluding bidders

health effects and optimal environmental taxes abstract the literature on environmental taxation in the presence of pre existing distortionary taxes has shown that interactions with these distortions tend to raise the cost of an environmental tax and thus that the optimal environmental tax is less than marginal environmental damages a recent paper by schwartz and repetto 2000 challenges this finding arguing that the health benefits from reduced pollution will also interact with pre existing taxes and may cause the optimal environmental tax to exceed marginal damages schwartz and repetto s analysis represented health effects implicitly in the utility function in contrast the present paper explicitly represents health effects in an analytically tractable general equilibrium model this model shows that interactions with health effects from pollution actually will tend to reduce the optimal environmental tax contradicting schwartz and repetto s conclusion this demonstrates the usefulness of explicitly modeling health effects and it reinforces the general notion that tax interactions tend to raise the costs of an environmental tax

social accounting and welfare measurement in a growth model with human capital this paper addresses social accounting and welfare measurement in an economy where human capital is an important factor in the economic system human capital accumulation depends on the time consumers spend in education however human capital is also a separate argument in the production function facing firms which gives rise to a production externality in a command optimum where the externality is internalized we show that an augmented nnp measure is the appropriate welfare indicator we also discuss the taxtransfer system required for the decentralized economy to reach a command optimum

economic growth pollution and renewable resources abstract this paper first analyzes a model of economic growth with stock pollution allowing smooth substitution between emissions and reproducible capital when emissions are optimally controlled the steady state consumption is lower than without pollution control but the optimal steady state equilibrium may not exist if the marginal productivity of capital is bounded the steady state is shown to be a local saddle point independent of the rate of discount if pollution is not controlled a competitive economy moves along a stable growth path toward a too heavily polluted steady state next a growth model in which pollution affects the growth of renewable resources is presented the conditions for the existence and saddle point property of the steady state are given and the consequences of nonoptimal externality taxes are discussed when renewable resources are included higher than optimal pollution may decrease steady state consumption contrary to the case where renewable resources are ignored

air pollution and green accounts a simple model treating air emissions as cumulative pollutants is used to derive measures of green net national product the model implies that pollution emissions are properly valued at their marginal social costs in the measurement of green nnp the level of genuine savings net savings less the value of resource depletion and pollution emissions is shown to provide a useful indicator of sustainable development recent figures on the social costs of fuel cycles are used to derive genuine savings measures for the uk and other european nations several countries had negative genuine savings during the 1980s

all equilibria of the vickrey auction abstract this paper characterizes the set of nash equilibria in the second price sealed bid auction with independent private values and three or more bidders in addition we show that any effective reserve price implies uniqueness

collusion and price rigidity we consider an in nitely repeated bertrand game in which prices are publicly observed and each rm receives a privately observed i i d cost shock in each period we focus on symmetric perfect public equilibria sppe wherein any punishments are borne equally by all rms we identify a tradeoff that is associated with collusive pricing schemes in which the price to be charged by each rm is strictly increasing in its cost level such fully sorting schemes offer efficiency bene ts as they ensure that the lowest cost rm makes the current sale but they also imply an informational cost distorted pricing and or equilibrium path price wars since a higher cost rm must be deterred from mimicking a lower cost rm by charging a lower price a rigid pricing scheme where a rm s collusive price is independent of its current cost position sacri ces efficiency bene ts but also diminishes the informational cost for a wide range of settings the optimal symmetric collusive scheme requires i the absence of equilibrium path price wars and ii a rigid price if rms are sufficiently impatient however the rigid pricing scheme cannot be enforced and the collusive price of lower cost rms may be distorted downward in order to diminish the incentive to cheat when the model is modi ed to include i i d public demand shocks the downward pricing distortion that accompanies a rm s lower cost realization may occur only when current demand is high

collusion with almost no information we analyze noncooperative collusion in an infinitely repeated bertrand game where each of the n firms receives a privately observed i i d cost shock in each period and firms only and privately observe whether they have won the unit mass of consumers no other information is available and no communication is allowed we prove that there exist equilibria in private strategies approximating first best profits when firms are sufficiently patient in particular productive efficiency obtains in the limit

an empirical study of an auction with asymmetric information this paper examines federal auctions for drain age leases on the outer continental shelf from 1959 to 1969 these are leases that are adjacent to tracts on which a deposit has been discovered the authors find that the data strongly support the hypotheses that neighbor firms are better informed about the value of a lease than nonneighbor firms that neighbor firms coordinate their bidding decisions and that both types of firms bid strategically in accordance with the bayesian nash equilibrium model for first price sealed bid auctions with asymmetric information

impossibility of collusion under imperfect monitoring with flexible production we show that it is impossible to achieve collusion in a duopoly when 1 goods are homogenous and firms compete in quantities 2 new imperfect information arrives continuously without sudden events and 3 firms are able to respond to this new information quickly the result holds even if we allow for asymmetric equilibria or monetary transfers the intuition is that the flexibility to respond to new information quickly unravels any collusive scheme and that signals about the aggregate behavior only cannot be used effectively to provide individual incentives via transfers our result applies both to a simple stationary model and a more complicated one with prices following a mean reverting markov process

on the intergenerational allocation of natural resources it is known hartwick and others that under standard assumptions a society that invests in reproducible capital the competitive rents on its current extraction of exhaustible resources will enjoy a consumption stream constant in time it is shown here that this result can be interpreted as saying that an appropriately defined stock of capital including the initial endowment of resources is being maintained intact and that consumption can be interpreted as the interest on that patrimony this seems like a useful rule of thumb for policy

tacit collusion in repeated auctions abstract this paper considers the question of tacit collusion in repeated auctions with independent private values and with limited public monitoring mcafee and mcmillan show that the extent of collusion is tied to the availability of transfers monetary transfers allow cartels to extract full surplus a folk theorem proved by fudenberg et al econometrica 62 1994 997 1039 shows that transfers of future payoffs are almost as good if players are patient and communicate before auctions we ask how the scope of collusion is affected if players dispense with explicit communication and their monitoring is limited collusion better than bid rotation is still feasible but full surplus cannot be extracted this constraint becomes less severe with more players and large cartels can become asymptotically efficient even with very limited monitoring

optimal bidding in auctions from a game theory perspective abstract the game theoretic perspective in auction bidding has provided a powerful normative framework for the analysis of auctions and it has generated an impressive volume of research contributions tracing this research we review key recent advances which have greatly expanded our understanding of the operation of auctions and produced a more accurate analysis of mechanism design and optimal bidding we follow various experimental studies which have shown that the predictive power of auction theory remains in many cases limited for this reason we concentrate on research themes which enhance the applicability of auction theory leading to more realistic descriptions of bidding behaviors we identify important innovations which expand the environment of auction bidding and carry us beyond rational decision making we conclude providing directions of future research and discussing their implications

tourism demand modelling and forecasting a review of recent research abstract this paper reviews the published studies on tourism demand modelling and forecasting since 2000 one of the key findings of this review is that the methods used in analysing and forecasting the demand for tourism have been more diverse than those identified by other review articles in addition to the most popular time series and econometric models a number of new techniques have emerged in the literature however as far as the forecasting accuracy is concerned the study shows that there is no single model that consistently outperforms other models in all situations furthermore this study identifies some new research directions which include improving the forecasting accuracy through forecast combination integrating both qualitative and quantitative forecasting approaches tourism cycles and seasonality analysis events impact assessment and risk forecasting

the folk theorem with imperfect public information the authors study repeated games in which players observe a public outcome that imperfectly signals the actions played they provide conditions guaranteeing that any feasible individually rational payoff vector of the stage game can arise as a perfect equilibrium of the repeated game with sufficiently little discounting the central condition requires that there exist action profiles with the property that for any two players no two deviations one by either player give rise to the same probability distribution over public outcomes the results apply to principal agent partnership oligopoly and mechanism design models and to one shot games with transferable utilities copyright 1994 by the econometric society

pollution tax design and green national accounting abstract this paper concerns social accounting when pollution gives rise to a consumption externality the purpose of the paper is to reconcile the willingness to pay technique as a means of collecting information put forward in earlier studies with the growth theoretical approach to social accounting this is accomplished by designing approximations of pigouvian emission taxes on the basis of currently available willingness to pay information the paper analyses the welfare effects of these taxes as well as to what extent they can be used to measure approximately the value of depletion of environmental capital in the national accounts

competition in tourism among the mediterranean countries this paper examines tourism competition among the mediterranean countries with particular emphasis on greece the estimated model includes as explanatory variables an income index a price index of the host country a price index of the competitors spain portugal and italy and exchange rate the results show that the main determinants of greece s tourism demand are both price indexes and exchange rate they also show that spain seems to be greece s main competitor

bribing in first price auctions abstract i study a symmetric 2 bidder ipv first price auction prior to which one bidder can offer his rival a bribe in exchange for the latter s abstention i focus on pure and undominated strategies and on continuous monotonic equilibria equilibria in which the bribing function is continuous and nondecreasing when types are distributed continuously on the unit interval such an equilibrium if it at all exists is necessarily trivial its bribing function is identically zero i provide a sufficient condition for its existence and sufficient conditions for its nonexistence when the minimum type is strictly positive a non trivial equilibrium may exist but it must be pooling i provide a sufficient condition for the existence of such an equilibrium when types are distributed continuously on the unit interval and dominated strategies are allowed a non trivial non pooling equilibrium exists at least under the uniform prior

the long run impact of exchange rate regimes on international tourism flows abstract notwithstanding the systematic inclusion of an exchange rate variable of some form in studies examining international tourism flows hardly any research has been carried out to test for a possible exchange rate regime effect drawing from recent advances in exchange rate regime classifications this paper begins to fill this gap by investigating the impact of exchange rate regimes on international tourism flows the study employs a system generalized methods of moments sys gmm estimation for tourist arrivals on a panel of 27 organization for economic co operation and development oecd and non oecd countries for the period 1980 2011 the results identify multiple exchange rate regime effects and support the importance of maintaining a relatively stable exchange rate to attract international tourist arrivals

national accounts and environmental resources in the paper optimal growth theory is used to derive the appropriate definition of the net national product concept when there are environmental resources and environmental damage to take into account the basic conclusions are that conventional defined np should be corrected by deducting environmental damage and adding the value of the net change of all resources

private monitoring in auctions abstract we study infinitely repeated first price auctions in which a bidder only learns whether or not he won the object while repetition of the stage game equilibrium is the unique nash equilibrium in public strategies with patient bidders there are simple nash equilibria in private strategies that improve on bid rotation sequential rationality is appropriately captured by essentially perfect bayesian equilibrium epbe which ignores behavior after irrelevant histories our main result is the construction of epbea that improve upon bid rotation assuming symmetry the exclusionary schemes of skrzypacz and hopenhayn tacit collusion in repeated auctions j econ theory 114 2004 153 169 including asymptotically efficient ones are supported as epbea

the demand for international tourism in the mediterranean region the paper studies the demand for international tourism in the mediterranean region first a review of the most important attempts to model econometrically the demand for international tourism in the past is given followed by a formal presentation of the proposed theoretical model in particular a version of the almost ideal demand system aids is adopted and a description of the variables involved and their sources together with the estimation procedure are provided the diagrammatic analysis performed contributes to a better understanding of the evolution of the dependent variable over time the results with respect to the expenditure as well as to the own and cross price elasticities may be regarded as econometrically satisfactory and a reasonable economic explanation is given

wealth from optimal health abstract recently much research has been devoted to the question of how the conventional net national product measure should be augmented so as to cover changes in the stocks of natural resources this paper investigates the treatment of health capital and the risk of doomsday caused by pollution in such welfare measures our problem is not a standard optimal control problem because the survival probability depends on state variables we show how to handle this complication the resulting welfare measure is contrasted with the conventional net national product measure finally we address the matter of how to design a subsidy on health investment such that a market economy provides the optimal level of health

adjusting green nnp to measure sustainability weitzman provides a foundation for nnp as the stationary equivalent of a wealth maximizing path when there is a constant interest rate and no exogenous technological progress here the implications of weitzman s foundation are explored in a case encountered in resource models i e the case of non constant interest rates in a setting that allows for exogenous technological progress an expression for nnp is obtained that adjusts green nnp for anticipated capital gains and interest rate effects to produce a measure that indicates sustainability this result is important when measuring the relative sustainability of resource rich and resource poor countries i introduction how should net national product nnp be adjusted for the depletion of natural and environmental resources a prerequisite for examining this problem is to decide on an underlying notion of income at the personal level hicks 1946 defines income as the consumption that if kept constant would yield the same present value as a person s actual future receipts since market prices are not influenced by any single person this notion of income equals a person s maximal sustainable consumption at the national level national income can likewise be defined as the consumption that if kept constant would yield the same present value as the actual future consumption path unless the nation is a small open economy faced with given international prices this notion of national income will exceed

a contribution to the theory of welfare accounting a kind of unified theory is proposed as a dynamic generalization of the standard consumer surplus methodology for evaluating welfare changes the unified theory allows rigorous dynamic welfare comparisons to be inferred between any two economic situations from just knowing current incomes and observing a short run market demand schedule essentially the change in present discounted future utility is exactly captured by the formula difference in current income plus consumer surplus this well known formula is thereby shown to cover a far wider class of welfare comparisons than is customarily treated in the textbook static case

a robust folk theorem for the prisoner s dilemma we prove the folk theorem for the prisoner s dilemma using strategies that are robust to private monitoring from this follows a limit folk theorem when players are patient and monitoring is sufficiently accurate but private and possibly independent any feasible individually rational payoff can be obtained in sequential equilibrium the strategies used can be implemented by finite randomizing automata journal of economic literature classification numbers c72 c73 d82

demand elasticities of tourism in singapore abstract in 1983 the un economic and social commission for asia and the pacific set up a study to investigate the relationship between prices of tourist goods and tourist inflow in singapore the analysis was carried out on a world level using amalgamated data for 15 nations also individually for each of the five major tourist generating countries determinants of demand considered were income exchange rates shopping and hotel prices and local disturbances tourism demand is found to be highly income elastic whereas effects of prices and exchange rate movements vary between countries two out of three disturbance factors significantly reduced demand

bidder collusion at forest service timber sales allegations of bidder collusion at forest service timber sales in the pacific northwest were common in the 1970s of course prices may be low for reasons other than collusion we formulate an empirical model that allows for both bidder collusion and supply effects and in which we control for demand conditions noncooperative behavior in which a single unit is sold the standard auction model is a special case it is found to be definitively outperformed by a model of collusion we also find that supply effects are dominated by collusion in determining the winning bids in the market

bid rotation and collusion in repeated auctions this paper studies bidder collusion with communication in repeated auctions when no side transfer is possible it presents a simple dynamic bid rotation scheme which coordinates bids based on communication history and enables intertemporal transfer of bidders payoffs the paper derives a sufficient condition for such a dynamic scheme to be an equilibrium and characterizes the equilibrium payoffs in a general environment with affiliated signals and private or interdependent values with ipv it is shown that this dynamic scheme yields a strictly higher payoff to the bidders than any static collusion scheme which coordinates bids based only on the current reported signals

health nutrition and economic development the relationship between health and economic development is explored focusing on nutrition based health indicators the spotlight is placed on the inter related feedbacks between the influence of health on productivity on one hand and the influence of income on health status on the other disentangling causality in these relationships has preoccupied much of the literature we evaluate different empirical strategies that have been adopted and assess the results there is now a body of evidence based on careful empirical studies that demonstrates a causal relationship between health and labor productivity there is also evidence that at least among the very poor additional income is spent on improved nutrition there are two issues that have received little attention although we argue they are likely to be very important first measurement of health is discussed in detail evidence is presented on how taking into account differences in the extent of measurement error is critical for interpreting the impact of health on wages the same theme emerges in studies of the effect of income on health specifically calorie intake the key role of non linearities in these relationships is highlighted and we demonstrate that a good deal of the variation in estimates of income elasticities of demand for calories can be ascribed to the role of measurement and functional form authors

collusion in the presence of externalities i examine collusive bidder behavior in auctions with negative externalities and show that the optimal bidding scheme exhibits only partial rigidity because of externalities a cartel not only has incentive to maximize gains from trade but also to minimize the probability of sales i identify the tension between the two incentives and show that the more rigid the bidding scheme the higher the possibility of sales as the extent of externalities increases the cartel finds it more important to keep a low probability of sales than to minimize payment to the seller this results in a partially rigid optimal collusive bidding scheme

robust collusion with private information the game theoretic literature on collusion has been hard pressed to explain why a cartel should engage in price wars without resorting to either impatience symmetry restrictions inability to communicate or failure to optimize this paper introduces a new explanation that relies on none of these assumptions if the cartel s member firms have private information about their costs price wars can be optimal in the face of complexity specifically equilibria that are robust to pay off irrelevant disruptions of the information environment generically cannot attain or approximate efficiency an optimal robust equilibrium must allocate market shares inefficiently and may call for price wars under certain conditions for a two firm cartel cost interdependence is a sufficient condition for price wars to arise in an optimal robust equilibrium that optimal equilibria are inefficient generically applies not only to collusion games but also to the entire separable pay off environment a class that includes most typical economic models copyright 2012 oxford university press

collusion enforcement with private information and private monitoring abstract this paper shows that a cartel that observes neither costs prices nor sales may still enforce a collusive agreement by tying each firm s continuation profit to the truncated current profits of the other firms the mechanism applies to both price and quantity competition and the main features are broadly consistent with common cartel practice identified by harrington and skrzypacz 24

the balance of trade and exchange rates theory and contemporary evidence from tourism abstract the purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of exchange rate depreciations and appreciations on the tourism trade balance specifically we employed linear and nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag ardl cointegration techniques to analyze the extent to which currency depreciations and appreciations affect the united states u s bilateral tourism trade with canada mexico and the united kingdom u k the results showed that the depreciation of the u s dollar subsequently improves the u s trade balance with all three trading partners however while the appreciation of the u s dollar deteriorates the u s bilateral tourism trade balance with canada and the u k it does not ultimately affect the u s bilateral tourism trade with mexico in the long term these results provide evidence contradicting the j curve theory supporting the postulations of the ml condition theoretical and policy implications are discussed within the realms of j curve theory marshall lerner ml condition international trade and tourism

natural resources national accounting and economic depreciation abstract the current value hamiltonian in an aggregate optimal growth problem with heterogeneous capital stocks including exhaustible renewable and environmental stocks is the nnp function routine substitutions reveal that the using up of natural resource stocks is representable as easy to interpret economic depreciation magnitudes we obtain true nnp inclusive of natural resource stock diminution implications for actual national accounting practices are also discussed

an example of a repeated partnership game with discounting and with uniformly inefficient equilibria in this note we present an example of a repeated partnership game with imperfect monitoring in which all supergame equilibria with positive discount rates are bounded away from full efficiency uniformly in the discount rate provided the latter is strictly positive on the other hand if the players do not discount the future then every efficient one period payoff vector that dominates the one period equilibrium payoff vector can be attained by an equilibrium of the repeated game thus the correspondence that maps the players discount rate into the corresponding set of repeated game equilibrium payoff vectors is discontinuous at the point at which the discount rate is zero

first price auctions in the asymmetric n bidder case i consider the first price auction when the bidders valuations may be differently distributed i show that every bayesian equilibrium is an essentially pure equilibrium formed by bid functions whose inverses are solutions of a system of differential equations with boundary conditions i then prove the existence of an equilibrium i prove its uniqueness when the valuation distributions have a mass point at the lower extremity of the support i give sufficient conditions for uniqueness when every valuation distribution is one of two atomless distributions i establish inequalities between equilibrium strategies when relations of stochastic dominance exist between valuation distributions

first best collusion without communication abstract i study a 2 bidder infinitely repeated ipv first price auction without transfers communication or public randomization where each bidder s valuation can assume in each of the statistically independent stage games one of three possible values under certain distributional assumptions the following holds for every 0 there is a nondegenerate interval 0 1 such that if the bidders discount factor belongs to then there exists a perfect public equilibrium with payoffs close to the first best payoffs

benefit transfer in europe how reliable are transfers between countries the benefits for specific health impacts related to air and water quality were measured in simultaneous contingent valuation surveys conducted in five different european countries consistent inter country differences in willingness to pay to avoid ill health episodes could not be explained by measurable differences in individual characteristics international transfer of unit values resulted in an average transfer error of 38 accounting for measurable differences among countries in health status income and other demographic measures either through ad hoc adjustments to the transferred values or through value function transfer did not improve transfer performance

modeling the effects of health on economic growth abstract this paper investigates the effects of health indicators such as adult survival rates asr on gdp growth rates at 5 year intervals in several countries panel data were analyzed on gdp series based on purchasing power adjustments and on exchange rates first we developed a framework for modeling the inter relationships between gdp growth rates and explanatory variables by re examining the life expectancy income relationship second models for growth rates were estimated taking into account the interaction between asr and lagged gdp level issues of endogeneity and reverse causality were addressed lastly we computed confidence intervals for the effect of asr on growth rate and applied a test for parameter stability the results showed positive effects of asr on gdp growth rates in low income countries

belief based equilibria in the repeated prisoners dilemma with private monitoring abstract we analyze repeated prisoners dilemma games with imperfect private monitoring and construct mixed trigger strategy equilibria such strategies have a simple representation where a player s action only depends upon her belief that her opponent s are continuing to cooperate when monitoring is almost perfect the symmetric efficient outcome can be approximated in any prisoners dilemma game while every individually rational feasible payoff can be approximated in a class of such games the efficiency result extends when there are more than two players it requires that monitoring be sufficiently accurate but does not require very low discounting when a public randomization device is available journal of economic literature classification numbers c73 d82

bribing in second price auctions an ipv 2 bidder second price auction is preceded by two rounds of bribing prior to the auction each bidder can try to bribe his rival to depart from the auction so that he the briber will become the sole participant bribes are offered sequentially according to an exogenously given order restricting attention to pure strategies and imposing a certain refinement i study the efficient equilibria of this game in any such equilibrium whenever the first mover offers a strictly positive bribe this bribe is given by his surplus his valuation minus the payoff that he would have received in the dominant strategy equilibrium of the auction i derive a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of such an equilibrium i also extend this equilibrium s construction to a model with general valuations not necessarily ipv

efficiency in repeated prisoner s dilemma with private monitoring abstract this paper analyzes repeated games with private monitoring where in each period each player receives a signal of the other player s action in the previous period and that signal is private information previous literature on discounted repeated games with private monitoring has not shown whether or not nearly efficient equilibria exist for a repeated prisoner s dilemma satisfying a certain assumption regarding stage game payoffs we show that there exists a nearly efficient sequential equilibrium provided that imperfectness of signals is small and players are patient journal of economic literature classification number c73