on the robustness of equilibrium refinements abstract the philosophy of equilibrium refinements is that the analyst if he knows things about the structure of the game can reject some nash equilibria as unreasonable the word know in the preceding sentence deserves special emphasis if in a fixed game the analyst can reject a particular equilibrium outcome but he cannot do so for games arbitrarily close by then he may have second thoughts about rejecting the outcome we consider several notions of distance between games and we characterize their implications for the robustness of equilibrium refinements

one man one bid abstract we compare two mechanisms to implement a simple binary choice e g adopt one of two proposals we show that when neither alternative is ex ante preferred simple majority voting cannot implement the first best outcome we introduce a simple bidding mechanism where votes can be bought at a quadratic cost and voters receive rebates equal to the average of others payments this mechanism is budget balanced individually rational and fully efficient in the limit moreover the mechanism redistributes from those that gain from the outcome to those that lose and everyone is better off under bidding compared to voting we test the two mechanisms in the lab using an environment with moderate and extremist voters the observed efficiency losses under voting are close to theoretical predictions and significantly larger than under bidding because of redistribution the efficiency gain from bidding benefits mostly the moderate voters

on the possibility of efficient private provision of public goods through government subsidies abstract this paper investigates the possibility of implementing an efficient provision of a public good through distortionary tax subsidy policies in a simple one shot game of voluntary contributions within the class of all linear tax subsidy policies two cases are distinguished the first is where individual taxes only depend on the sum of all other individuals contributions although such policies may increase total supply of the public good it is shown that the implementation of an efficient amount is not possible unless the government has complete information about individual characteristics in the second case where taxes depend on the distribution of contributions the equilibrium supply of the public good is no longer unique for any efficient interior solution there might also exist inefficient boundary solutions moreover unlike the boundary solutions the efficient interior solution is in general not stable

two remarks on the property rights literature we first point out that the recent property rights literature is based on three assumptions 1 that contracts are always subject to renegotiation 2 that the exercise of a property right confers a private benefit and 3 that parties are risk neutral building on hart moore 1999 we provide conditions under which an optimal contract consists of nothing more than an assignment of property rights we also examine the robustness of some of the literature s standard predictions about asset ownership to the introduction of mechanisms for eliciting parties ex post willingness to pay for the assets such as options or financial markets to illustrate the issue we revisit the hart moore 1990 proposition that joint ownership is suboptimal and argue that ownership by a single party is dominated by joint ownership with put options

simple mechanisms and preferences for honesty we consider full implementation in complete information environments when agents have an arbitrarily small preference for honesty we offer a condition called separable punishment and show that when it holds and there are at least two agents any social choice function can be implemented by a simple mechanism in two rounds of iterated deletion of strictly dominated strategies

an experimental study of truth telling in a sender receiver game a recent experimental study of cai and wang 2005 on strategic information transmission reveals that subjects tend to transmit more information than predicted by the standard equilibrium analysis to evidence that this overcommunication phenomenon can be explained in terms of a tension between normative social behavior and incentives for lying we show in a simple sender receiver game that subjects incurring in costs to punish liars tell the truth more often than predicted by the logit agent quantal response equilibria whereas subjects that do not punish liars after receiving a deceptive message play on the aggregate equilibrium strategies thus we can partition the subject pool into two groups one group of subjects with preferences for truth telling and one taking into account only material incentives

micro economic modelling of biofuel system in france to determine tax exemption policy under uncertainty abstract liquid biofuel support program launched in 1993 in france is implemented through tax exemptions to biofuels produced by agro industrial chains activity levels are fixed by decree and allocated by the government to the different chains based on earmarked budget increase voted in the parliament total quantity of biofuels will be increased by 50 in the horizon 2002 2003 a micro economic biofuel activity model containing a detailed agricultural sector component that is represented by 700 farms is used to estimate costs and surpluses generated by the activity at the national level as well as tax exemption levels furthermore monte carlo simulation has been used to search for efficient tax exemptions policies in an uncertain environment where biofuel profitability is significantly affected by petroleum price and soja cake prices results suggest that for the most efficient units both at the industry level large size biomass conversion units and at the agricultural sector level most productive farms unitary tax exemptions could be decreased by 10 20 for both biofuels ethyl ether and methyl ester with no risk for the viability of any existing chain

the role of bounded rationality and imperfect information in subgame perfect implementation an empirical investigation in this paper we conduct a laboratory experiment to test the extent to which moore and repullo s subgame perfect implementation mechanism induces truth telling in practice both in a setting with perfect information and in a setting where buyers and sellers face a small amount of uncertainty regarding the good s value we nd that moore repullo mechanisms fail to implement truth telling in a substantial number of cases even under perfect information about the valuation of the good this failure to implement truthtelling is due to beliefs about the irrationality of one s trading partner therefore although the mechanism should in theory provide incentives for truth telling many buyers in fact believe that they can increase their expected monetary payo by lying the deviations from truth telling become signicantly more frequent and more persistent when agents face small amounts of uncertainty regarding the good s value our results thus suggest that both beliefs about irrational play and small amounts of uncertainty about valuations may constitute important reasons for the absence of moore repullo mechanisms in practice

learning dynamics for mechanism design an experimental comparison of public goods mechanisms in a repeated interaction public goods economy incomplete information and dynamic behavior may affect the realized outcomes of mechanisms known to be efficient in a complete information oneshot game an experimental test of five public goods mechanisms indicates that subjects with private information appear to best respond to recent observations this provides predictions about which mechanisms will generate convergence to their efficient equilibrium allocations these predictions match the experimental result that globally stable efficient mechanisms realize the highest efficiency in practice the simplicity of the suggested best response model makes it useful in predicting stability of mechanisms not yet tested

incomplete contracts and the theory of the firm what have we learned over the past 25 years incomplete contracts and the theory of the firm what have we learned over the past 25 years

the influence of elections on imf programme interruptions using panel data for 104 countries between 1975 and 1998 this article tries to explain interruptions of imf programmes around election dates in the recipient countries on average programmes seem to be more likely to break down before elections this increase in interruption probabilities is however less severe in more democratic countries in true democracies interruption frequencies are even lower prior to elections while no other political variables than elections and democracy were found to influence compliance systematically programme interruptions are significantly more likely in countries with high government consumption high levels of short term debt and low gdp per capita at programme initiation

exploring the scope of neurometrically informed mechanism design a basic goal in mechanism design is to construct mechanisms that simultaneously satisfy efficiency voluntary participation and dominant strategy incentive compatibility previous work has shown that this is impossible unless the agents and planner have sufficient information about each other and common knowledge these results have remained largely theoretical because the required information is generally not available in practical applications however recent work has shown that these limitations can be overcome in simple settings using neurometric technologies that provide noisy signals of subjects preferences that can be used in the mechanism design problem here we build on this work by carrying out two new experiments designed to test the extent to which these neurometrically informed mechanisms nims can be applied to more complicated and realistic environments we find robustness to large type and action space and to the degrees of loss and risk aversion observed in most of our sample

the fuelwood market in greece an empirical approach abstract wood has been since ancient times the basic household heating medium nowadays wood remains the primary energy source in rural areas of developing countries mainly in africa in greece the domestic demand of fuelwood is relied mainly on the fuelwood domestic supply especially during the post war period the domestic supply satisfies adequately the domestic demand eliminating the role of imports the present study surveys the long run relationship between the fuelwood prices of different forest species in order to determine the role of the special market conditions in their price formation in addition the error correction model is estimated in order to survey the direction of the granger causality among the prices of the fuelwood forest species the implementation of the impulse response analysis and the variance decomposition confirmed that coniferous and beech fuelwood producer price may account for the volatility of the oak fuelwood producer price this result may contribute greatly to the conservation of oak forest an important carbon storage forest ecosystem

secure implementation experiments do strategy proof mechanisms really work strategy proofness requiring that truth telling is a dominant strategy is a standard concept used in social choice theory saijo et al 2003 argue that this concept has serious drawbacks in particular announcing one s true preference may not be a unique dominant strategy and almost all strategy proof mechanisms have a continuum of nash equilibria for only a subset of strategy proof mechanisms do the set of nash equilibria and the set of dominant strategy equilibria coincide for example this double coincidence occurs in the groves mechanism when preferences are single peaked we report experiments using two strategy proof mechanisms where one of them has a large number of nash equilibria but the other has a unique nash equilibrium we found clear differences in the rate of dominant strategy play between the two

relative performance of two simple incentive mechanisms in a public goods experiment we compare the performance of two incentive mechanisms in public goods experiments one mechanism the falkinger mechanism rewards and penalizes agents for deviations from the average contributions to the public good falkinger mechanism the other the compensation mechanism allows agents to subsidize the other agents contributions compensation mechanism it is found that both mechanisms lead to an increase in the level of contributions to the public goods however the falkinger mechanism predicts the average level of contributions more reliably than the compensation mechanism

to see is to believe common expectations in experimental asset markets abstract we experimentally manipulate agents information regarding the rationality of others in a setting in which previous studies have found irrationality to be present namely the asset market experiments introduced by smith et al 1988 recent studies suggest that mispricing in such markets may be an artefact of confusion which can be reduced by training subjects to understand the diminishing fundamental value we reconsider this view and propose that when it is made public knowledge that training has occurred this may also reduce uncertainty over the behavior of others and facilitate the formation of common expectations our design disentangles the direct effect of training from the indirect effect of its public knowledge and our results demonstrate a distinct and statistically significant effect of public knowledge over and above that of training alone

biofuel market and carbon modeling to analyse french biofuel policy abstract in order to comply with european union objectives france has set up an ambitious biofuel plan this plan is evaluated on the basis of two criteria tax exemption on fossil fuels and greenhouse gases ghg emission savings an economic marginal analysis and a life cycle assessment lca are provided using a coupling procedure between a partial agro industrial equilibrium model and an oil refining optimization model thus we determine the minimum tax exemption needed to place on the market a targeted quantity of biofuel by deducting the biofuel long run marginal revenue of refiners from the agro industrial marginal cost of biofuel production with a clear view of the refiner s economic choices total pollutant emissions along the biofuel production chains are quantified and used to feed an lca the french biofuel plan is evaluated for 2008 2010 and 2012 using prospective scenarios results suggest that biofuel competitiveness depends on crude oil prices and demand for petroleum products and consequently these parameters should be taken into account by authorities to modulate biofuel tax exemption lca results show that biofuel production and use from seed to wheel would facilitate the french government s compliance with its plan climat objectives by reducing up to 5 ghg emissions in the french road transport sector by 2010

a solution to the problem of externalities when agents are well informed the author describes a class of simple two stage mechanisms that implement efficient allocations as subgame perfect equilibria for economic environments involving externalities these mechanisms known as compensation mechanisms solve a wide variety of externalities problems including implementation of lindahl allocations regulation of monopoly and efficient solutions to the prisoner s dilemma copyright 1994 by american economic association

catalysing private capital flows do imf programmes work as commitment devices in this article we examine whether imf programmes influence the ability of developing country issuers to tap international bond markets and if they improve spreads paid on the bonds issued we find that fund programmes do not provide a uniformly favourable signalling effect instead the evidence is most consistent with a positive effect of imf programmes when they are viewed as likely to lead to policy reform and when undertaken before economic fundamentals have deteriorated significantly the size of the fund s programme matters but the credibility of a joint commitment by the country and the imf appears to be critical enhancing its members access to international capital markets is widely regarded as an important objective of the international monetary fund imf or fund though the objective is not an explicitly stated purpose in the fund s articles of agreements the flow of international capital is essential to such stated purposes as the stability of the international monetary system efficient trade and productive resource use and to providing confidence when a member country experiences difficulties with its balance of payments 1 the fund s interest in private international capital flows has moreover increased over the last decade reflecting this evolution the fund s former managing

the role of the imf in low income countries the question of whether the imf should effectively engage with its low income member countries has recently generated a wide debate among development economists policymakers and advocates from nongovernmental organizations this note elaborates on the important role that the imf can play in its lowincome member countries points to some current problems with the fund s engagement with these countries and suggests avenues for future improvement

when does learning in games generate convergence to nash equilibria the role of supermodularity in an experimental setting this study clarifies the conditions under which learning in games produces convergence to nash equilibria in practice previous work has identified theoretical conditions under which various stylized learning processes achieve convergence one technical condition is supermodularity which is closely related to the more familiar concept of strategic complementarities we experimentally investigate the role of supermodularity in achieving convergence through learning using a game from the literature on solutions to externalities we systematically vary a free parameter below close to at and beyond the threshold of supermodularity to assess its effects on convergence we find that supermodular and near supermodular games converge significantly better than those far below the threshold from a little below the threshold to the threshold the improvement is statistically insignificant within the class of supermodular games increasing the parameter far beyond the threshold does not significantly improve convergence simulation shows that while most experimental results persist in the long run some become more pronounced

towards a renaissance of economic theory in his penetrating essay theory and experiment vernon smith observes that subject behavior often diverges from game theoretic predictions and asserts that minor fudging with theory is unlikely to solve our problems because circumstances unknown to us are responsible for the explanatory failures of neoclassical economic theory i deal precisely with these issues in thebounds of reason 2009a my remarksheredrawupon several themes fromthis book relevant to specifying a refocused research agenda for the study of human strategic interaction the core of economic theory is the rational actor model which holds that individuals have preferences over outcomes beliefs called subjectivepriors linking choices to the relativeprobability of alternativeoutcomes and theymaximize their expected payoffs given these preferences and beliefs subject towhatevermaterial informational and other constraints they face many observers consider the experimental work of daniel kahneman and others kahneman et al 1982 gigerenzer and todd 1999 as destructive of the rational actormodel in fact however their research has considerably strengthened the rational actor model s explanatory power albeit at the expense of increasing its complexity gintis 2009a chs 1 and 12 most important these studies have shown the value of modeling using heuristics that conserve on information processing and of including the current state physiological temporal and ownership of the individual as an argument of the preference ordering in the 1980s the core of economic theory was extended to include game theory viewed as the theory of the strategic interaction of bayesian rational actors game theory has become a centerpiece of microeconomic theory alongside the traditional walrasian model of general market equilibrium it is important to note however that this exalted position is quite recent the textbooks that expound the received wisdom of today s practicing economists were written in the early years of the game theory revival between 1988 and 1995 these textbooks include misconceptions promulgated in the 1980s that have been transmitted to the current generation of economists as i shall show some of these misconceptions have been repaired in more recent contributions to game theory contemporary experimentalists however generally rely on the more traditional body of outdated theory i here rely on more recent theoretical contributions especially those of robert aumann and adam brandenburger and their coworkers to bring game theory up to date i then argue that despite their analytical power game theory and the rational actor model provide only part of the theoretical toolkit needed to explain human strategic interaction moreover because individuals bring much of the complexity of society into the controlled conditions of the laboratory game theory and the rational actor model are insufficient to explain experimental results concretely i suggest that a these analytical tools must be supplemented by what i term the psycho social theory of norms b the correlated equilibrium should replace

backward induction normal form perfection and explicable equilibria a weakening of d kreps and r wilson s 1982 notion of sequential rationality is presented the motivation stems from the difficulty in justifying sequentially rational behavior in subgames reachable only through a violation of sequential rationality although the present notion of weak sequential rationality is based upon extensive form considerations it bears a close relation to r selten s 1975 normal form perfect equilibria backward induction outcomes can be achieved in generic games of perfect information with additional restrictions on beliefs an example with imperfect information shows that sequential rationality is not the consequence of equilibrium play and the absence of incredible threats copyright 1992 by the econometric society

a dual self model of impulse control we propose that a simple dual self model gives a unified explanation for several empirical regularities including the apparent time inconsistency that has motivated models of quasi hyperbolic discounting and rabin s paradox of risk aversion in the large and small the model also implies that self control costs imply excess delay as in the o donoghue and rabin models of quasi hyperbolic utility and it explains experimental evidence that increased cognitive load makes temptations harder to resist the base version of our model is consistent with the gul pesendorfer axioms but we argue that these axioms must be relaxed to account for the effect of cognitive load

the groves ledyard mechanism an experimental study of institutional design the groves ledyard mechanism theoretically can solve the free rider problem in public good provision in certain environments two questions are of overriding importance in implementing the mechanism the first is related to the actual performance of the mechanism in general the second is the choice of a punishment parameter which is the only parameter that is available for those who may want to actually use the mechanism thus the determination of the role of this variable on mechanism performance is fundamental for any advances along the lines of actual implementation in studying the groves ledyard mechanism we show that the punishment parameter plays a crucial role in the performance of the mechanism by using 1 and 100 we show that under the higher punishment parameter the groves ledyard equilibrium is chosen much more frequently a higher level of the public good is provided and efficiency is higher by examining two behavioral models we show that a higher leads to an increase in the probability of an individual choosing a best response predicted by the model the parameter alone explains nearly 70 of the data in both the cournot and the carlson auster behavioral model we also found that convergence to cournot behavior is faster and more stable under a high than under a low

promises and conventions an approach to pre play agreements abstract i analyze how informal agreements can be sustained by moral emotions with regard to a large class of two player games specifically i assume that people feel guilty if they breach an agreement and that the guilt increases according to the degree of the harm inflicted on the other a central insight is that it is easier to sustain efficient informal agreements if actions are strategic complements than if they are strategic substitutes i complement this general insight by studying two specific cases where negotiators face uncertainty about the breach of the agreement i show that while the optimal agreement in a game with strategic substitutes must compromise on surplus maximization and efficiency the optimal agreement in a game with sufficiently strong strategic complements tends to maximize both the surplus and the probability of compliance especially if the game is symmetric

self confirming equilibrium and the lucas critique we examine the role of off path superstitions in macro economics and show how a false belief about off path play is the key element underlying both the lucas critique and the game theoretic concept of self confirming equilibrium however the impact of false beliefs in these two cases is different in the lucas case a policy maker s incorrect beliefs about off path play can lead to the adoption of mistaken policy innovation however the consequences of such an innovation provide evidence that the belief that motivated them was wrong in contrast play may never escape an undesirable self confirming equilibrium as the action implied by the mistaken belief does not generate data that contradicts it escape from the self confirming equilibrium requires that players do a sufficient amount of experimentation with off path actions

coupling economic and ghg emission accounting models to evaluate the sustainability of biogas policies abstract the aim of this study is to evaluate and quantify the impacts of different biogas and related policies on the agricultural sector as well as their performance in terms of climate change mitigation and associated costs to do so we coupled the partial equilibrium approach simulating the market clearing process with the perspective of life cycle assessment of ghg applying it to the well documented lombardy case results show that the recent italian biogas policy prompting manure utilization and reducing the average subsidy per kwh effectively increased the environmental sustainability of the system which only now seems able to counteract global warming synergies are observed when the recent common agricultural policy greening reform is simultaneously considered by the model

nonspeculative bubbles in experimental asset markets lack of common knowledge of rationality vs actual irrationality we report the results of an experiment designed to study the role of speculation in the formation of bubbles and crashes in laboratory asset markets in a setting in which speculation is not possible bubbles and crashes are observed the results suggest that the departures from fundamental values are not caused by the lack of common knowledge of rationality leading to speculation but rather by behavior that itself exhibits elements of irrationality much of the trading activity that accompanies bubble formation in markets where speculation is possible is due to the fact that there is no other activity available for participants in the experiment

subgame perfect implementation this paper examines the use of stage mechanisms in implementation problems and provides a partial characterization of the set of subgam e perfect implementable choice rules it is shown that in many economic environments virtually an y choice rule can be implemented to illustrate the power of this approach the paper discusses a number of models in which it is possible to implement the first best although it wouldn t have been possible to do so without using stage mechanisms the diversity of these models suggests that subgame perfect implementation may find wide application copyright 1988 by the econometric society

subgame perfect implementation under information perturbations we consider the robustness of extensive form mechanisms to deviations from common knowledge about the state of nature which we refer to as information perturbations first we show that even under arbitrarily small information perturbations the moore repullo mechanism does not yield even approximately truthful revelation and that in addition the mechanism has sequential equilibria with undesirable outcomes more generally we prove that any extensive form mechanism is fragile in the sense that if a non maskin monotonic social objective can be implemented with this mechanism then there are arbitrarily small information perturbations under which an undesirable sequential equilibrium also exists finally we argue that outside options can help improve efficiency in asymmetric information environments and that these options can be thought of as reflecting ownership of an asset

self confirming equilibrium rium path of play thus if a self confirming equilibrium occurs repeatedly no player ever observes play that contradicts his beliefs even though beliefs about play at off path information sets need not be correct we characterize the ways in which self confirming equilibria and nash equilibria can differ and provide conditions under which self con firming equilibria correspond to standard solution concepts nash equilibrium and its refinements describe a situation in which i each player s strategy is a best response to his beliefs about the play of his opponents and ii each player s beliefs about the opponents play are exactly correct we propose a new equilibrium concept self confirming equilibrium that weakens condition ii by requiring only that players beliefs are correct along the equilibrium path of play thus each player may have incorrect beliefs about how his opponents would play in contingencies that do not arise when play follows the equilibrium and moreover the beliefs of different players may be wrong in different ways the concept of self confirming equilibrium is motivated by the idea that noncooperative equilibria should be interpreted as the outcome of a learning process in which players revise their beliefs using their observations of previous play suppose that each time the game is played the players observe the actions chosen by their opponents but that players do not observe the actions their opponents would have played at the information sets that were not reached along the path of play then if a self confirming equilibrium occurs repeatedly no player ever observes play that contradicts his beliefs so the equilibrium is self confirming in the weak sense of not being inconsistent with the evidence by analogy with the literature on the bandit problem e g rothschild 1974 one might expect that a non nash self confirming equilibrium can be the outcome of plausible learning processes this point was made by fudenberg and

rational behavior with payoff uncertainty abstract the iterated deletion of weakly dominated strategies has been advanced as a necessary requirement for rational play however this requirement relies on the assumption that the players have no doubts about their opponents payoffs we show that once such doubts are introduced all that can be justified by an appeal to rationality is one round of deletion of weakly dominated strategies followed by iterated deletion of strategies that are strongly dominated this extends the fudenberg kreps and levine j econ theory 12 1988 354 380 study of the robustness of nash equilibrium refinements to the robustness of solution concepts based only on rationality our results also clarify the relationship between various notions of what it means for payoff uncertainty to be small

an experiment in the demand revealing process the principal findings of this experiment are it is somewhat time consuming but not otherwise difficult to employ the demand revealing process in groups of 10 to 60 the ability of the demand revealing process to take account of intensities of preferences is appreciated by many of the persons who have used the process but the departure from one man one vote is strongly resisted by others the outcomes reached by demand revealing differed from majority rule in about one tenth of the cases the improvement in efficiency associated with these reversals of majority rule was 2 25 percent of the net benefit of making the efficient decisions the clarke taxes which would decline in percentage terms as group size increased were 3 04 percent of the net value of efficient decisions for the decisions studied

a new solution for the moral hazard problem in team production we propose an intergroup competition scheme ics to theoretically solve free riding in team production and provide experimental evidence from a voluntary contribution mechanism public goods game the ics includes an internal transfer payment from the lowest to highest contributing team proportional to the difference in group contributions the ics requires minimal information makes the efficient contribution a dominant strategy and is budget balanced these features make the ics ideally suited to solve the moral hazard problem in team production our experiment demonstrates that the ics raises contributions to almost reach optimality with the appropriate parameters we also show experimentally that the success of the ics can be primarily attributed to the effect of higher returns and to the introduction of competition and it is not due to the introduction of potential losses or information regarding other groups data as supplemental material are available at http dx doi org 10 1287 mnsc 2014 1922

implementation in undominated strategies a look at bounded mechanisms this paper examines the impact of placing natural restrictions on the mechanisms considered for implementation problems it is shown that if all mechanisms are considered and preferences satisfy a basic condition then any social choice correspondence can be implemented in undominated strategies an example points out that the strength of this result derives from the use of mechanisms with questionable features in part of the message space the agent who announces the highest integer is rewarded this sort of tail chasing construction common in the constructive proofs of the literature is used to assure that undesired strategy combinations do not form an equilibrium if such mechanisms are ruled out then the social choice correspondences which can be implemented in undominated strategies satisfy an incentive compatibility type condition called strategy resistence for social choice functions this is equivalent to strategy proofness this contrast suggests that this issue should be examined as it applies to other solution concepts used in implementation theory the last portion of the paper begins to explore the issue as it relates to nash implementation and undominated nash implementation

abreu matsushima mechanisms experimental evidence abstract abreu matsushima mechanisms can be applied to a broad class of games to induce any desired outcome as the unique rationalizable outcome we conduct experiments investigating the performance of such mechanisms in two simple coordination games in these games one pure strategy equilibrium is focal we assess the efficacy of abreu matsushima mechanisms for implementing the other pure strategy equilibrium outcome abreu matsushima mechanisms induce some choices consistent with the desired outcome but more choices reflect the focal outcome moreover strengthening the mechanism has a perverse effect when the desired outcome is a pareto dominated risk dominated equilibrium journal of economic literature classification number c7

implementation via approval mechanisms abstract we focus on the single peaked domain and study the class of generalized approval mechanisms g a m s first players simultaneously select subsets of the outcome space and scores are assigned to each alternative and then a given quantile of the induced score distribution is implemented our main finding is that essentially for every nash implementable welfare optimum including the condorcet winner alternative there exists a gam that nash implements it importantly the gam that nash implements the condorcet winner alternative is the first simple simultaneous game with this feature in the literature

experiments with the pivot process for providing public goods interest in demand revealing mechanisms for providing public goods has both waned and then renewed over the past two decades the possibility of using such mechanisms in different venues than originally anticipated sparked the research reported here the specific motivation for this paper is to conduct a series of simple direct tests of one version of the class of mechanisms failure of demand revelation was much more expensive than we had expected even when compared to previous research with related mechanisms the reason for this remains an open question

what happened to the three legged centipede game abstract in the last two decades several frameworks have been proposed to analyze the question of whether common knowledge of rationality is sufficient to justify the play of backward induction bi in games of perfect information three strands of literature have addressed this issue the literature on equilibrium refinements the literature on knowledge based epistemology and the literature on interactive epistemology this paper surveys seminal frameworks within the first two strands of research and assesses the extent to which they provide a satisfactory solution to the problem these approaches are illustrated using a three legged version of rosenthal s centipede game which is the classical example in the literature the paper argues that some of these frameworks provide sensible answers to the riddle of bi or at least succeed in bringing the paradox to another level the paper also points at consistency problems in the body of refinements of nash equilibrium revealed by the surveyed literature

modern hyper and high inflations since 1947 hyperinflations by cagan s definition in market economies have been rare much more common have been longer inflationary processes with inflation rates above 100 percent per annum based on a sample of 133 countries and using the 100 percent threshold as the basis for a definition of very high inflation episodes this paper examines the main characteristics of such inflations among other things we find that i close to 20 percent of countries have experienced inflation above 100 percent per annum ii higher inflation tends to be more unstable iii in high inflation countries the relationship between the fiscal balance and seigniorage is strong both in the short and long run iv inflation inertia decreases as average inflation rises v high inflation is associated with poor macroeconomic performance and vi stabilizations from high inflation that rely on the exchange rate as the nominal anchor are expansionary

environmental cost effectiveness of bio diesel production in greece current policies and alternative scenarios following european directive 2003 30 ec the greek government adapted legislation that introduces and regulates the bio diesel market the implemented quota scheme allocates the country s annual predetermined tax exempt production of bio diesel to industries based on their ability to meet several criteria a number of bio diesel supply chain stakeholders have criticized this policy for being efficiency robbing and vague this paper uses 2007 data from energy crop farms and three bio diesel producing companies in order to assess these criticisms we study the economic and environmental aspects of the currently adopted policy and compare them to three alternative scenarios we conclude that such criticisms have a merit and that policy makers need to reconsider their alternative options regarding the promotion of bio diesel in transport permission of sales directly to local consumers and promotion of forward integration by farmers are efficiency enhancing and environment friendly means of promoting the use of bio diesel in transport

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

quadratic voting and the public good introduction this introduction to the public choice special issue on quadratic voting qv and the public good provides an opinionated narrative summary of the contents and surveys the broader literature related to qv qv is a voting rule proposed by one of us weyl quadratic vote buying http goo gl 8yeo73 2012 lalley and weyl quadratic voting https papers ssrn com sol3 papers cfm abstract id 2003531 2016 building off earlier work by groves and ledyard econometrica 45 4 783 810 1977a hylland and zeckhauser a mechanism for selecting public goods when preferences must be elicited kennedy school of government discussion paper d 70 1980 where individuals buy as many votes as they wish by paying the square of the votes they buy using some currency an appreciation of the history of research in the field suggests that qv is uniquely practically relevant compared to the other approximately pareto efficient mechanisms economists have proposed for collective decisions on public goods however it faces a number of sociological and ethical concerns regarding how a political system organized around qv would achieve the efficiency aims stated in abstract theory and whether the pure aggregate income maximizing definition of efficiency qv optimizes in its simplest form is desirable the papers in this volume flesh out and formalize these concerns but also provide important responses in two ways by suggesting domains where they are unlikely to be applicable primarily related to survey research of various kinds and versions of qv using an artificial currency that maintain many of qv s benefits while diffusing the most important critiques together this work suggests both a practical path for applying qv in the near term and a series of research questions that would have to be addressed to broaden its application

implementation of mechanism by processes public good allocation experiments abstract the design problem for decentralized public good provisions is outlined hyothesized to be incomplete if the process the informational logic of decisionreaching is left unspecified experiments with the incentive compatible deficit mechanism and two different processes smith and seriatim are reported more failures to agree are found with the smith process but neither set of experiments supports a hypothesis of outcomes approximating the pareto efficient cournot nash equilibrium allocation this is hypothesized to result from the failure of the deficit mechanism to balance the budget

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

a non cournot model of voluntary collective action the interaction of selfish rational actors in the provision of a public good is analyzed in an attempt to explain recent experimental findings as well as real world cases of voluntary collective action the model which allows for more sophisticated behavior than that assumed by the conventional cournot theory predicts a higher level of collective action that that theory the impacts of income effects and of the price elasticity of demand for the public good are given special emphasis

nash equilibrium and welfare optimality if is a set of social alternatives a social choice rule scr assigns a subset of a to each potential profile of individuals preferences over a where the subset is interpreted as the set of welfare optima a game form or mechanism implements the social choice rule if for any potential profile of preferences 1 any welfare optimum can arise as a nash equilibrium of the game form implying in particular that a nash equilibrium exists and 2 all nash equilibria are welfare optimal the main result of this paper establishes that any scr that satisfies two properties monotonicity and no veto power can be implemented by a game form if there are three or more individuals the proof is constructive

rationality nash equilibrium and backwards induction in perfect information games we say that a player is certain of an event a if she assigns probability 1 to a there is common certainty cc of a if the event a occurred each player is certain of a each player is certain that every other player is certain of a and so forth it is shown that in a generic perfect information game the set of outcomes that are consistent with common certainty of rationality ccr at the beginning of the game coincides with the set of outcomes that survive one deletion of weakly dominated strategies and then iterative deletion of strongly dominated strategies thus the backward induction outcome is not the only outcome that is consistent with ccr in particular cooperation in rosenthal s 1981 centipede game and fighting in selten s 1978 chainstore game are consistent with ccr at the beginning of the game next it is shown that if in addition to ccr there is cc that each player assigns a positive probability to the true strategies and beliefs of the other players and if there is cc of the support of the beliefs of each player then the outcome of the game is a nash equilibrium outcome