perishable inventory theory a review this paper reviews the relevant literature on the problem of determining suitable ordering policies for both fixed life perishable inventory and inventory subject to continuous exponential decay we consider both deterministic and stochastic demand for single and multiple products both optimal and sub optimal order policies are discussed in addition a brief review of the application of these models to blood bank management is included the review concludes with a discussion of some of the interesting open research questions in the area

information acquisition and under diversification if an investor wants to form a portfolio of risky assets and can exert effort to collect information on the future value of these assets before he invests which assets should he learn about the best assets to acquire information about are ones the investor expects to hold but the assets the investor holds depend on the information he observes we build a framework to solve jointly for investment and information choices with general preferences and information cost functions although the optimal research strategies depend on preferences and costs the main result is that the investor who can first collect information systematically deviates from holding a diversified portfolio information acquisition can rationalize investing in a diversified fund and a concentrated set of assets an allocation often observed but usually deemed anomalous copyright wiley blackwell

contagion as a wealth effect financial contagion is described as a wealth effect in a continuous time model with two risky assets and three types of traders noise traders trade randomly in one market long term investors provide liquidity using a linear rule based on fundamentals convergence traders with logarithmic utility trade optimally in both markets asset price dynamics are endogenously determined numerically as functions of endogenous wealth and exogenous noise when convergence traders lose money they liquidate positions in both markets this creates contagion in that returns become more volatile and more correlated contagion reduces benefits from portfolio diversification and raises issues for risk management during the f inancial panic associated with the default of the russian government in august 1998 and the subsequent collapse of the hedge fund long term capital management numerous hedge funds banks and securities firms tried simultaneously to reduce exposures to a variety of financial instruments such as russian bonds brazilian stocks u s mortgages spreads between on therun and off the run government securities and spreads between swaps and u s treasuries although the fundamental values of these positions would appear to have little correlation during this financial crisis the asset prices in these markets exhibited the following common empirical pattern 1 financial intermediaries suffered losses as prices moved against their positions 2 market depth and liquidity decreased simultaneously in several markets 3 the volatility of prices increased simultaneously in several markets and

strategic responses to automobile emissions control a game theoretic analysis abstract this paper examines the dynamics of standard setting regulation under technological uncertainty and asymmetric information about technological capability a two period model which allows fully strategic action is developed and applied to the regulation of automobile emissions a situation in which standards have been used to force innovation it is found that the initial level of r d activity caused by regulation increases with the intrinsic technical capability of industry this result done not depend on marginal productivities of research that favor high capability types and implies that a poor capability industry will not attempt to compensate for its inability to innovate with increased research activity it is also found that the regulator s ability to induce investment is greater when r d is likely to be unsuccessful

planning under incomplete information and the ratchet effect abstract central planning of production is usually performed under asymmetric information the firm in general has more information about its productive possibilities than the central planner from now on for short cp this justifies the use of incentives schemes in which the cp does not directly fix activity levels casual observation of such existing schemes suggests that the time dimensions is crucial for their working typically the cp revises the incentive scheme over time to take into account the information provided by the firm s performance managers of centrally planned economies as well as economists have long recognized that this revision induces firms to underproduce in order to avoid demanding schemes in the future this is the ratchet effect it is purpose of the present paper to study the ratchet effect under the non commitment assumption which we believe to be more realistic the inadequacy of conceptual tools made if difficult in the past to consider such an assumption now basic research on dynamic games with incomplete information recently resulted in new ideas which look particularly relevant for a theoretical analysis of the problem

bargaining around cost benefit standards abstract injurers often purchase the property of potential victims to avoid liability or to comply with regulations this paper shows that injurers subject to cost benefit standards could profit from buying out victims even if they attach no value to the victims property because buyouts allow injurers to take fewer precautions a buyout of one victim produces a negative externality for the remaining victims injurers can consequently exploit victims and thereby reduce social welfare by adopting a divide and conquer strategy or by negotiating with victims sequentially perhaps surprisingly buyouts may reduce social welfare and victims joint profits even if victims make simultaneous or sequential take it or leave it buyout demands to the injurer

imperfect competition information heterogeneity and financial contagion this study examines how heterogeneity of private information may induce financial contagion using a model of multi asset trading in which the three main channels of contagion through financial linkages in the literature correlated information correlated liquidity and portfolio rebalancing are ruled out by construction i show that financial contagion can still be an equilibrium outcome when speculators receive heterogeneous fundamental information risk neutral speculators trade strategically across many assets to mask their information advantage about one asset asymmetric sharing of information among them prevents rational market makers from learning about their individual signals and trades with sufficient accuracy incorrect cross inference about terminal payoffs and contagion ensue when used to analyze the transmission of shocks across countries my model suggests that the process of generation and disclosure of information in emerging markets may explain their vulnerability to financial contagion jel d82 g14 g15

commitment and fairness in a dynamic regulatory relationship this paper considers a multiperiod model of a regulated firm that has stationary private information which may be revealed through performance if it cannot make commitments to future policies the regulator has an incentive to exploit any information the firm reveals and laffont and tirole show that there is no regulatory policy that is separating over any closed interval a fairness arrangement is proposed in which the firm agrees not to quit if in future periods the regulator allows it to earn a nonnegative profit given the type it revealed in earlier periods the properties of such arrangements are studied and an example is presented in which both the firm and the regulator prefer a fairness arrangement to a policy feasible without commitment

environmental quality competition and eco labeling abstract a three stage game of investment environmental quality provision and price competition is developed to study the impact of green technology investment eco labeling in a duopoly model of vertical product differentiation the firms incentives to invest in green technologies depend on their relative cost structure when firms are identical with respect to fixed costs both firms will always invest but if one firm is more efficient in investing then the other firm may or may not invest depending on the level of unit cost of investment quality competition will be tighter when the low quality firm is more efficient and looser when the high quality firm is more efficient in investing socially optimal investment for both firms is always positive but lower than in the duopoly solution in the absence of environmental externalities the quality dispersion chosen by profit maximizing firms may be too high or too low while environmental externalities increase the possibility low quality dispersion that is too low within the market solution finally and importantly ecolabeling can be used as a means of reducing excessive investment and increasing environmental quality that is too low

regulatory attitudes and environmental innovation in a model combining internal and external r d the extent to which environmental regulatory institutions are either green or brown impacts not just the intensity of regulation at any moment but also the incentives for the development of new pollution control technologies we set up a strategic model of r d in which a polluter can deploy technologies developed in house or license technologies developed by specialist outsiders an eco industry polluters exert r d effort and may even develop redundant technologies to improve the terms on which they procure technology from outside we find that while regulatory bias has an ambiguous impact on the best available technology strategic delegation to systematically biased regulators can improve social welfare

tax competition when governments lack commitment excess capacity as a countervailing threat consider a multinational firm that can produce for the world market from two countries in each country the firm has to make a costly ex ante investment in capacity after which each government chooses a tax rate and then the firm determines output levels if there were only one country there would be the standard timeinconsistency problem the government would set a confiscatory tax ex post the firm would realize this ex ante and no investment would be made the interesting point of this paper is that the situation is very different when there are two countries the firm invests in both countries so as to gain leverage ex post if the firm holds more capacity than is needed to meet world demand then this induces tax competition for capacity utilization among governments ex post because the firm can threaten to serve the market at least partially from a plant in a different country competition leads to low enough tax rates to justify the initial investment in excess capacity when capacity costs are sufficiently low when capacity costs are too high the firm will not invest at all as the standard timeinconsistency problem suggests thus the paper generates and combines tax competition and lack of government commitment within a single framework the above logic provides also a novel argument for becoming a multinational firm there is some evidence in support of the strategic use of excess capacity for example general motors gm announced it will build almost identical plants in several risky countries which allows gm to shift production easily at the same time the newly established capacity will probably exceed gm s sales another application is the problem of how multinationals export oil from the caspian sea the caspian sea is surrounded by politically unstable countries multinationals started to build and lobby for multiple pipelines through several countries in order to keep transit fees low these and other applications are discussed in more detail in section v the paper sheds new light on the relationship between multinational firms and host governments on the one hand a multinational firm can be viewed as the powerful agent in the relationship because the firm decides in which country to invest eager governments often offer substantial tax benefits in order to attract investment this view is underlying the literature on tax competition see for example john d wilson 1986 dan a black and william h hoyt 1989 ian king et al 1993 on the other hand and in a separate literature multinational firms are portrayed as the potential victims of host governments who may renege on tax promises after the firm has made a sunk investment and has become partially immobile see for example eric w bond and larry samuelson 1989 chris doyle and sweder van wijnbergen 1994 jonathan thomas and tim worrall 1994 hence the host government is the powerful agent and this may lead to underinvestment if anticipated by the firm 2 while both views capture elements of truth it is unsatisfactory that our understanding of the relationship seems to department of economics university of colorado boulder co 80309 e mail janeba colorado edu this research was undertaken while i was at indiana university in bloomington i am grateful to mike baye susanne janeba dave schmidt greg shaffer jay wilson and two anonymous referees as well as participants at the stanford institute for theoretical economics 1998 and workshop participants at the universities of bonn colorado indiana michigan munich pennsylvania state and toronto for very helpful comments the usual disclaimer applies l in a different context patrick j kehoe 1989 considers also tax competition after a private sector decision is made in his model however atomistic individuals decide on savings and cannot influence the degree of tax competition 2 it should be noted that in the second literature strand tax holidays are sometimes derived endogenously in an infinite horizon game tax holidays help overcome lack of commitment see for instance doyle and van wijnbergen 1994

should renewable energy policy be renewable political flexibility brings about trade offs for policy makers aiming to support the deployment of renewable energy sources res on the one hand it allows incorporating new information on ex ante uncertain benefits and costs of res policy on the other hand it may deter res investments this paper scrutinizes how these trade offs play out economically and politically when res policy makers choose the degree of flexibility as well as the instruments to implement flexibility the analysis builds on a theoretical framework distinguishing between flexibility by design and by adjustment it is complemented by a discussion of three case studies res support schemes in germany and the united kingdom and the eu emissions trading scheme theoretical as well as empirical results suggest that the politically chosen degree of flexibility by policy design may be sub optimally low in contrast flexibility by policy adjustment is often excessively high

financial contagion and attention allocation this paper explains financial contagion between two stock markets with uncorrelated fundamentals by fluctuations in international investors attention allocation we model the process of attention allocation that underlies portfolio investment in international markets using investors who face information processing constraints investors optimally allocate more attention to a region hit by a financial crisis to the detriment of other markets the resulting endogenous increase in uncertainty causes a reduction in the capacity to bear risks by international investors that induces them to liquidate their positions in all risky assets hence there is a collapse in stock prices around the world we show that the degree of non anticipation of a crisis is crucial for the existence of contagion using data from the east asian crisis and the number of news stories about thailand in the financial times relative to news stories about argentina brazil and chile as a proxy for the relative attention allocated to the asian stock market we find evidence consistent with two key predictions of our model first the higher the volatility of the originator market the more relative attention allocated to this market and second the more relative attention allocated to the originator market the higher the volatility of the other markets our findings support the attention reallocation channel as a transmission mechanism of financial crises between regions during the period from january 1997 to july 1998

approximation algorithms for perishable inventory systems we develop the first approximation algorithms with worst case performance guarantees for periodic review perishable inventory systems with general product lifetime for both backlogging and lost sales models the demand process can be nonstationary and correlated over time capturing such features as demand seasonality and forecast updates the optimal control policy for such systems is notoriously complicated thus finding effective heuristic policies is of practical importance in this paper we construct a computationally efficient inventory control policy called the proportional balancing policy for systems with an arbitrarily correlated demand process and show that it has a worst case performance guarantee less than 3 in addition when the demands are independent and stochastically nondecreasing over time we propose another policy called the dual balancing policy which admits a worst case performance guarantee of 2 we demonstrate through an extensive numerical study that both policies perform consistently close to optimal

pollution taxes when firms choose technologies we consider the properties of a pollution tax when the regulated firm has a discrete choice of technologies with which to reduce pollution the firm s technology choice makes possible two sequences of play the traditional one in which the regulator moves first committing to a tax rate before the firm adopts a technology and an alternative one in which the firm moves first by adopting a technology we find that a range of pollution levels including possibly the first best one are unattainable when the regulator moves first the regulator may be better able to achieve the first best outcome when the firm moves first

regulatory balancing and the efficiency of green r d we identify and analyse several dynamic implications of setting environmental standards such as to balance marginal costs and benefits the adoption of such a regulatory approach is shown to effect i the speed of improvement of abatement technologies ii the direction in a sense to be defined of that improvement iii its source and the distribution of the rents from it and iv the rate of development of defensive averting technologies existing views are thoroughly synthesised in the context of a simple diagrammatic model several new results are derived and at least one conventional wisdom questioned the message of the analysis for legislators and regulators is that cost benefit balancing should be done with care

pollution permits and environmental innovation abstract this paper starts with a warning about the negative impact of plain pollution allowance markets on environmental pollution innovation stand alone spot markets enable the government to expropriate an innovation by offering a competing technology pollution permits that puts an arbitrary downward pressure on the licensing price advance allowances reduce expropriation but still create suboptimal incentives for innovation they have the further drawback that permits are inefficiently used when the innovation occurs options to pollute at a given striking price fare better than allowances because they create private incentives to phase out pollution in the case of innovation we characterize the social optimum and show that it can be implemented by issuing options to pollute inter alia finally the paper compares ex ante and ex post government procurement surprisingly ex post licensing by the innovator to the government may yield a higher licensing fee than an ex ante contract

asymmetric price movements and borrowing constraints a rational expectations equilibrium model of crises contagion and confusion this study proposes a rational expectations equilibrium model of crises and contagion in an economy with information asymmetry and borrowing constraints consistent with empirical observations the model finds 1 crises can be caused by small shocks to fundamentals 2 market return distributions are asymmetric and 3 correlations among asset returns tend to increase during crashes the model also predicts 1 crises and contagion are likely to occur after small shocks in the intermediate price region 2 the skewness of asset price distributions increases with information asymmetry and borrowing constraints and 3 crises can spread through investor borrowing constraints

investor attention overconfidence and category learning abstract motivated by psychological evidence that attention is a scarce cognitive resource we model investors attention allocation in learning and study the effects of this on asset price dynamics we show that limited investor attention leads to category learning behavior i e investors tend to process more market and sector wide information than firm specific information this endogenous structure of information when combined with investor overconfidence generates important features observed in return comovement that are otherwise difficult to explain with standard rational expectations models our model also demonstrates new cross sectional implications for return predictability

implications of rational inattention abstract a constraint that actions can depend on observations only through a communication channel with finite shannon capacity is shown to be able to play a role very similar to that of a signal extraction problem or an adjustment cost in standard control problems the resulting theory looks enough like familiar dynamic rational expectations theories to suggest that it might be useful and practical while the implications for policy are different enough to be interesting

government intervention in production and incentives theory a review of recent contributions national science foundation the commissariat general du plan and the center for energy policy research at m i t

instrument choice when regulators and firms bargain abstract we compare outcomes with an emissions tax and an emissions standard when a firm and regulator engage in cooperative bargaining over the stringency of the regulation bargaining is motivated by giving the firm a choice of abatement technologies if the firm s preferred technology differs from the regulator s the first best outcome is not an equilibrium of the traditional noncooperative game in which the regulator is a stackelberg leader the regulator may therefore choose to offer the firm a more lenient regulation if it agrees to switch technologies we find that the resulting bargaining outcomes differ for a tax and a standard even though information is symmetric and we identify conditions under which each instrument yields lower social costs

contagious speculation and a cure for cancer a nonevent that made stock prices soar a sunday new york times article on a potential development of new cancer curing drugs caused entremed s stock price to rise from 12 063 at the friday close to open at 85 and close near 52 on monday it closed above 30 in the three following weeks the enthusiasm spilled over to other biotechnology stocks the potential breakthrough in cancer research already had been reported however in the journal nature and in various popular newspapers including the times more than five months earlier thus enthusiastic public attention induced a permanent rise in share prices even though no genuinely new information had been presented a central tenet of f inancial economics is that an asset should trade at the risk adjusted present value of its expected future cash f lows these expected future cash f lows exist in people s minds and do not normally lend themselves to direct observation an equilibrium price in a frictionless market does not tolerate disagreements among market participants if some people deem the price too low they will buy the asset if others think it is too high they will sell it short if necessary although the efficient markets hypothesis predicts that price changes are unpredictable it associates them with changes in traders beliefs about future cash f lows or the appropriate discount rate beliefs change with the arrival of new information thus in hindsight at least we should be able to ascribe price changes to the arrival of specific new information we examine this view in the context of a series of news reports in the media pertaining to entremed enmd a biotechnology company and other members of its sector the sunday may 3 1998 edition of the new york times reports on a recent breakthrough in cancer research and mentions enmd a company with licensing rights to the breakthrough kolata 1998 the story s impact on the stock prices was immediate huge and to a large extent permanent the new news content of the times story was nil though the substance of the story had been published as a scientific piece in nature boehm et al 1997 and in the popular press including the times itself wade 1997 more than five months earlier in november 1997

enforcement leverage when penalties are restricted in the united states empirical studies of the enforcement of continuous compliance with environmental regulations especially air and water pollution regulations have repeatedly demonstrated the following i for most sources the frequency of surveillance is quite low ii even when violations are discovered fines or other penalties are rarely assessed in most states iii sources are nonetheless thought to be in compliance a large part of the time the evidence for the apparently low level of enforcement activity is found in a number of case studies of state and local enforcement of air and water quality regulations conducted jointly by the environmental protection agency epa and council on environmental quality ceg together with periodic surveys of implementation of air and water quality legislation conducted by the general accounting office gao these surveys show

on crises contagion and confusion abstract since the tequila crisis of 1994 1995 the asian flu of 1997 and the russian virus of 1998 economists have been busy producing research on the subject of contagion yet few studies have examined empirically through which channels the disturbances are transmitted if there are indeed fundamental reasons for the spillovers we observe we attempt to fill this gap by analyzing how both trade links and the largely ignored financial sector links influence the pattern of fundamentals based contagion we examine the role of international bank lending the potential for cross market hedging and bilateral and third party trade in the propagation of crises

asset prices and exchange rates in this paper we study the implications of introducing demand shocks and trade in goods into an otherwise standard international asset pricing model trade in goods gives rise to an additional channel of international propagation through the terms of trade absent in traditional single good asset pricing models the inclusion of demand shocks helps overturn many unrealistic implications of existing international flnance models in which productivity shocks are the sole source of uncertainty our model generates a rich set of implications on how stock bond and foreign exchange markets co move we solve the model in closed form which yields a system of equations that can be readily estimated empirically our estimation validates the main predictions of the theory

commitment versus discretion in climate and energy policy to decarbonize the power sector policy makers need to commit to long term credible rules for climate and energy policy otherwise risk of opportunistic policy making will impair investments into low carbon technologies however the future benefits and costs of decarbonization are subject to substantial uncertainties thus there may also be societal gains from allowing policy makers the discretion to adjust the policies as new information becomes available we examine how this trade off between policy commitment either unconditional or state contingent and discretion affects the optimal intertemporal design of market based instruments in the power sector using a dynamic partial equilibrium model we show that commitment to a state contingent level of ambition for the market based instrument leads to higher welfare than both unconditional commitment and discretion with benefit uncertainty the choice between the practically more feasible approaches of unconditional commitment and discretion is analytically ambiguous a basic numerical illustration suggests that policy discretion may outperform unconditional commitment in terms of welfare however this result is reversed when only a limited fraction of benefit uncertainty resolves in reasonable time when future policy makers have own agendas or when investors are risk averse with cost uncertainty policy discretion is welfare superior if the government can commit to a technology deployment target

portfolio choice attention allocation and price comovement abstract this paper models the attention allocation of portfolio investors investors choose the composition of their information subject to an information flow constraint given their expected investment strategy in the next period which is to hold a diversified portfolio in equilibrium investors choose to observe one linear combination of asset payoffs as a private signal when investors use this private signal to update information about two assets changes in one asset affect both asset prices and may lead to asset price comovement the model also has implications for the transmission of volatility shocks between two assets

permanent versus interim regulations a game theoretic analysis abstract when a regulator anticipates learning about the benefits or costs of regulations over time questions can be raised about the appropriate regulatory policy this paper compares permanent and interim regulations in a setting with initially uncertain pollution damages a fixed capital input and costly enforcement the analysis shows that neither policy is first best conditions under which one policy dominates the other are identified with the help of a simulation the results indicate that permanent regulations may be preferable to interim regulations even when there is substantial uncertainty about damages

the application of queueing theory to continuous perishable inventory systems this paper develops two distinct models for studying inventory systems with continuous production and perishable items the perishable items have a deterministic usable life after which they must be outdated for each of the models analytical expressions derived from queueing theory are found for the steady state distribution of system inventory knowledge of this steady state behavior may be used for evaluation of system performance and for consideration of alternatives for improving system performance both models assume that inventory is replenished by a continuous production process the first model assuming continuous inventory units has poisson demand requests with the size of each request distributed as an exponential random variable the second model has poisson demand requests with all demands being for a single unit the analysis for both models exploits the similarity of the inventory system with a single server queueing system

the dynamics of incentive contracts the paper studies a simple two period principal agent model in which the principal updates the incentive scheme after observing the agent s first period performance the agent has superior information about his ability the principal offers a first period incentive scheme and observes some measure of the agent s first period performance cost or profit which depends on the agent s ability and unobservable first period effort the relationship is entirely run by short term contracts in the second period the principal updates the incentive scheme and the agent is free to accept the new incentive scheme or to quit the strategies are required to be perfect and updating of the principal s beliefs about the agent s ability follows bayes rule the central theme of the paper is that the ratchet effect leads to much pooling in the first period first for any first period incentive scheme there exists no separating equilibrium second when the uncertainty about the agent s ability is small the optimal scheme must involve a large amount of pooling the paper also gives necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of partition equilibria and looks at the effect of cost uncertainty

emission taxes and optimal refunding schemes abstract we examine how refunding emission taxes to firms dependent on market shares should be designed while refunding is harmful under perfect competition a first best self financing tax tax refunding scheme exists if the marginal damage from pollution exceeds the marginal distortion in an imperfectly competitive output market with symmetric firms under pre investment in cleaner technology with short term abatement opportunities a first best refunding scheme exists if pollution refunding can be made dependent on both market and investment shares

irreversible environmental investments with uncertain benefit levels abstract the principal property of irreversibilities is that they generate incentives for policies that are smaller in scale than a myopic policy the circumstances in which this irreversibility effect occurs are first considered for a model with unit benefit uncertainty and time invariant cost functions with changes in cost relationships over time such as fixed costs for augmenting investment it may be desirable to adopt policies with scales that are larger than smaller than or the same as the scale of a myopic policy with rising unit benefits over time one adopts a policy scale larger than or the same as that in the myopic case and with declining unit benefits the opposite result holds irreversibilities will however lead to underinvestments in comparison with incompletely reversible investments with similar adjustment costs for increasing policy investments

rational contagion and the globalization of securities markets this paper argues that globalization may promote contagion by weakening incentives for gathering costly information and by strengthening incentives for imitating arbitrary market portfolios in the presence of short selling constraints the gain of gathering information at a fixed cost may diminish as markets grow moreover if a portfolio manager s marginal cost for yielding below market returns exceeds the marginal gain for above market returns there is a range of optimal portfolios in which all investors imitate arbitrary market portfolios and this range widens as the market grows numerical simulations suggest that these frictions can have significant implications for capital flows in emerging markets

precautionary savings and the permanent income hypothesis this paper derives the explicit solution of a dynamic stochastic optimal consumption problem for infinitely lived agents whose preferences exhibit in the presence of non diversifiable labour income uncertainty a constant elasticity of intertemporal substitution and constant absolute risk aversion the constancy of the elasticity of intertemporal substitution which implies that marginal utility at zero consumption is infinite guarantees that the non negativity constraint on consumption is never binding along the optimal path the assumption of constant absolute risk aversion allows an explicit computation of human wealth and provides a simple representation of the precautionary savings motive

incentives for technological development bat is bad this paper examines the effect of environmental regulation on a firm s incentives to invest in developing cheaper clean up technologies in a model where consumers are willing to pay for environmentally clean technologies it focuses on two types of policies a bat based policy and a commitment policy in the former policy the standard is based on the best available technology bat where the regulator re optimizes environmental regulation in response to new technologies however under a commitment policy the regulator announces a regulation and sticks to it irrespective of the firm s adopted technology the paper finds that cleaner technologies are not adopted if the regulator announces a bat based policy a commitment policy not only leads to positive investment in research and development but is also welfare improving

dynamic regulation design without payments the importance of timing abstract we consider a two period model of optimal regulation of a firm subject to marginal compliance cost shocks the regulator faces an asymmetric information problem the firm knows current compliance costs but the regulator does not both the regulator and the firm are uncertain about future costs in our basic framework the regulator may not offer payments to the firm we show that the regulator can vary the strength of regulation over time to induce the firm to reveal its costs and increase welfare in the optimal mechanism the regulator offers stronger weaker regulation in the first period and weaker stronger regulation in the second period if the firm reports low high compliance costs in the first period low cost firms expect compliance costs to rise in the future and thus prefer weaker regulation in the second period high cost firms expect costs to fall in the future and thus prefer regulation which becomes stricter over time thus the regulator offers the low high cost firms slightly weaker stronger regulation in the second period in exchange for much stronger weaker regulation in the first period thereby timing the regulation if the regulator can make payments then the optimal mechanism to some degree times the regulation as long as a positive marginal cost of funds exists if the marginal cost of funds is high enough then under the optimal mechanism the regulator will not use payments and use our timing mechanism exclusively

gaming against managers in incentive systems experimental results with chinese students and chinese managers we examine strategic interactions between firms and planners in china comparing behavior between i students and managers with field experience with this situation ii standard versus increased monetary incentives and iii sessions conducted in context making explicit reference to interactions between planners and managers and those without any such references the dynamics of play are similar across treatments with play only gradually and incompletely converging on a pooling equilibrium a fivefold increase in incentives significantly increases initial levels of strategic play games played in context generated greater levels of strategic play for managers with minimal impact on students

analysis of a sampling control scheme for a perishable inventory system we consider an inventory system in which both the arrival of items and the demand for those items are poisson processes the stored items have two phases of shelf life if the item has not been taken by a demand during the first phase it is inspected with probability q it is removed and with probability p 1 q it is transferred to the second phase the blood bank model inspired this study we compute ergodic limits for the number of items in the system the lost demands and the two types of outdating

environmental policy choice with an uncertain chance of irreversibility abstract an uncertain chance of irreversibility leads to lower levels of investment than in the reversible case if there is downward irreversibility higher levels of investment if there is upward irreversibility and a possible effect in either direction in the case of complete irreversibility in all of these situations there will be an effect on initial policy investments whenever there is a nonzero probability that the irreversibility constraint is binding the policy design is based on equating initial marginal costs to conditional marginal benefits over the states in which the initial policy scale decision will be the policy choice the maximum attainable policy value is convex with respect to the probability of irreversibility

pollution permits and compliance strategies abstract this paper analyzes the impact of spot and futures markets for tradeable pollution permits on the potential polluters compliance decisions polluters can buy permits invest in pollution abatement or else stop production or source out we show that stand alone spot markets induce excessive investment the introduction of a futures market reduces this incentive to invest but is not the optimal way to control pollution a menu of options on pollution rights possibly coupled with intertemporally bundled sales yields higher welfare because of its focus on long run demand elasticities and rent extraction this paper can be applied to a variety of situations such as demand side management public transportation bypass in telecommunications or forward sales by a private monopolist

contagion and trade why are currency crises regional abstract currency crises tend to be regional they affect countries in geographic proximity this suggests that patterns of international trade are important in understanding how currency crises spread above and beyond any macroeconomic phenomena we provide empirical support for this hypothesis using data for five different currency crises in 1971 1973 1992 1994 and 1997 we show that currency crises affect clusters of countries tied together by international trade by way of contrast macroeconomic and financial influences are not closely associated with the cross country incidence of speculative attacks

markets and regulatory hold up problems abstract many regulatory programs such as environmental regulation are effective only if firms make irreversible investments that reduce the cost of compliance a firm potentially subject to regulation may therefore behave strategically by not investing thereby forcing the regulator to void the proposed regulation we show that such incentives which resemble a hold up problem may not be overcome when government s only tool is the imposition of an emissions tax the hold up problem can be overcome by the issuance of tradeable permits a time consistent equilibrium exists with all firms investing and the government imposing regulations even if no permits are traded and their market price is low indeed an observation of no trade may indicate that pollution abatement is great

dynamic incentives by environmental policy instruments a survey abstract in this paper i survey and discuss recent developments on the incentives provided by environmental policy instruments for both adoption and development of advanced abatement technology a main conclusion to be drawn from the literature is that under competitive conditions market based instruments usually perform better than command and control moreover taxes may provide stronger long term incentives than tradable permits if the regulator is myopic if the government can anticipate new technology or is able to react on it optimally regulatory policies by virtue of administered prices taxes and policies by setting quantities issuing tradable permits are almost equivalent the literature also shows that under competitive conditions there is no difference between auctioning permits and grandfathering moreover timing and commitment of environmental policy is not crucial for adoption under competitive conditions commitment has positive incentive effects however if an r d sector has market power in the presence of market imperfections the ranking of the different policy instruments is ambiguous

linking induced technological change and environmental regulation evidence from patenting in the u s auto industry a b s t r a c t this article uses a carefully screened patent database in automobile emission control technologies and a detailed regulatory action analysis to examine firms innovation in response to u s technology forcing auto emissions standards enacted between 1970 and 1998 the study finds that under the performance based technology forcing pbtf auto emissions regulations both automakers and compo nent suppliers innovated and introduced more advanced emission control technologies for automobile applications the study also shows that stringent pbtf regulation temporarily induced domestic u s firms to become more innovative than foreign firms that operated in the local u s market during the early phase of the regulatory regime findings of this research strongly imply that government intervention in the form of technology forcing regulation can drive firms to invest in technological innovation

temporal risk and the nature of induced preferences abstract it has been known since the work of h markowitz portfolio selection efficient diversification of investments yale univ press 1959 and j mossin amer econ rev 59 1969 172 174 that even an individual whose underlying preferences satisfy the von neumann morgenstern axioms will not choose over delayed i e temporal risky prospects in a manner which can be modelled as expected utility maximizing since most economically important instances of risk taking insurance real investment agriculture career training involve delayed as opposed to immediately resolved risk the standard use of expected utility theory to model such decisions must be questioned in this paper the technique of generalized expected utility analysis m j machina econometrica 50 1982 277 323 and the theory of support functions r t rockafellar convex analysis princeton univ press 1970 are applied to exactly model and hence determine the nature of preferences over temporal risky prospects

financial contagion and economic development an epidemiological approach abstract we develop an epidemiological approach to analyze how financial contagion may affect and be affected by economic activity we show that according to specific parameter values the economy may converge either to a non speculative or to a speculative equilibrium in the former situation the level of per capita income is maximal while in the latter it is reduced by financial contagion the presence of economic and financial feedback effects may also give rise to macroeconomic fluctuations during the transitional path clearly showing that such economic and financial links are an important driver of the short run macroeconomic performance by extending the analysis to a spatial dimension we also show that financial contagion in some specific region may propagate quickly also in regions far away from those in which the contagion initially occurs highlighting the role of regional policy coordination to avoid interregional contagion

a new class of tests of contagion with applications a new class of tests of contagion is proposed identifying transmission channels of financial market crises through changes in higher order moments of the distribution of returns such as coskewness applying the framework to test for contagion in real estate and equity markets following the hong kong crisis in 1997 1998 and the u s subprime crisis in 2007 shows that the coskewness based tests of contagion detect additional channels not identified by the correlation based tests implications of contagion in pricing exchange options where there is a change in higher order comoments of returns on the underlying assets are also investigated

optimal sticky prices under rational inattention this paper presents a model in which price setting firms decide what to pay attention to subject to a constraint on information flow when idiosyncratic conditions are more variable or more important than aggregate conditions firms pay more attention to idiosyncratic conditions than to aggregate conditions when we calibrate the model to match the large average absolute size of price changes observed in micro data prices react fast and by large amounts to idiosyncratic shocks but only slowly and by small amounts to nominal shocks nominal shocks have strong and persistent real effects we use the model to investigate how the optimal allocation of attention and the dynamics of prices depend on the firms environment jel e 3 e5 d8

the strategic use of innovation to influence regulatory standards this paper investigates the welfare consequences of strategic behavior by firms to affect the amount of environmental regulation they face environmental regulation often attempts to force an industry to develop cleaner technology but the regulator may have no means to commit to a specific standard this lack of regulatory commitment induces firms to choose innovation strategically it is well known that firms have incentives to suppress innovation to induce the regulator to ratchet down the standard and this strategic behavior lowers welfare this paper explores a countervailing incentive in oligopoly settings firms have heightened incentives to innovate so as to increase regulation and raise rivals costs in equilibrium the incentive to raise rivals cost can mitigate the welfare loss arising from no regulatory commitment also a regulator who is unable to commit ex ante to the stringency of a regulatory standard can induce more clean technology than a regulator with a commitment mechanism

regulating a monopolist with unknown costs we consider the problem of how to regulate a monopolistic firm whose costs are unknown to the regulator the regulator s objective is to maximize a linear social welfare function of the consumers surplus and the firm s profit in the optimal regulatory policy prices and subsidies are designed as functions of the firm s cost report so that expected social welfare is maximized subject to the constraints that the firm has nonnegative profit and has no incentive to misrepresent its costs we explicitly derive the optimal policy and analyze its properties in their classic papers dupuit 2 and hotelling 5 considered pricing policies for a bridge that had a fixed cost of construction and zero marginal cost they demonstrated that the pricing policy that maximizes consumer well being is to set price equal to marginal cost and to provide a subsidy to the supplier equal to the fixed cost so that a firm would be willing to provide the bridge this first best solution is based on a number of informational assumptions first the demand function is assumed to be known to both the regulator and to the firm while the assumption of complete information may be too strong the assumption that information about demand is as available to the regulator as it is to the firm does not seem unnatural a second informational assumption is that the regulator has complete information about the cost of the firm or at least has the same information about cost as does the firm this assumption is unlikely to be met in reality since the firm would be expected to have better information about costs than would the regulator as weitzman has stated an essential feature of the regulatory environment i am trying to describe is uncertainty about the exact specification of each firm s cost function in most cases even the managers and engineers most closely associated with production will be unable to precisely specify beforehand the cheapest way to generate various hypothetical output levels because they are yet removed from the production process the regulators are likely to be vaguer still about a firm s cost function 12 p 684 as this observation suggests it is natural to expect that a firm would have better information regarding its costs than would a regulator the purpose of this paper is to develop an optimal regulatory policy for the case in which the regulator does not know the costs of the firm one strategy that a regulator could use in the absence of full information about costs is to give the firm the title to the total social surplus and to delegate the pricing decision to the firm in pursuing its own interests which would then be to maximize the total social surplus the firm would adopt the same marginal cost pricing strategy that the regulator would have imposed if the regulator had

oligopoly extraction of a common property natural resource the importance of the period of commitment in dynamic games the theory of noncooperative dynamic games has provided an extremely powerful framework for studying many of the classic questions in industrial organization for example questions about resource extraction advertising research and development investment in new capacity and barriers to entry where interactions over time among few firms are involved however an important methodological issue arises when economic competition over time is modeled as a dynamic game the issue is the appropriate formulation of the players strategy spaces

information aggregation in a noisy rational expectations economy abstract this paper analyzes a general equilibrium model of a competitive security market in which traders possess independent pieces of information about the return of a risky asset each trader conditions his estimate of the return both on his own private source of information and price which in equilibrium serves as a noisy aggregator of the total information observed by all traders a closed form characterization of the rational expectations equilibrium is presented a counter example to the existence of fully revealing equilibrium is developed