efficient mechanisms for bilateral trading we consider bargaining problems between one buyer and one seller for a single object the seller s valuation and the buyer s valuation for the object are assumed to be independent random variables and each individual s valuation is unknown to the other we characterize the set of allocation mechanisms that are bayesian incentive compatible and individually rational and show the general impossibility of ex post efficient mechanisms without outside subsidies for a wide class of problems we show how to compute mechanisms that maximize expected total gains from trade and mechanisms that can maximize a broker s expected profit journal of economic literature classification number 026

the influence of private contractual failure on regulation the case of oil field unitization an analysis of the interdependence between regulation and private contractual failure reveals that the feasible range of regulation is restricted by the same forces that block private agreement the focus of the study is oil field unitization regulation in oklahoma texas and wyoming federal lands from 1948 through 1975 despite large potential gains from unitization private negotiations fail because of lease heterogeneities and information problems regarding lease value estimates in response the federal and state governments have adopted strikingly different policies to encourage unitization with different results only the federal government s regulations are effective because they surmount information problems texas has the least successful regulation the paper argues that the policy differences are due to the political influence of small firms that benefit from nonunitized production 25 references 2 tables

partial exposure in large games abstract in this work we introduce the notion of partial exposure in which the players of a simultaneous move bayesian game are exposed to the realized types and chosen actions of a subset of the other players we show that in any large simultaneous move game each player has very little regret even after being partially exposed to other players if players are given the opportunity to be exposed to others at the expense of a small decrease in utility players will decline this opportunity and the original nash equilibria of the game will survive

ex ante incentive efficient trading mechanisms without the private valuation restriction abstract the private valuation assumption found in most trading mechanism design papers rules out markets whose valuation structure generates externalities between traders this paper characterizes the set of ex ante incentive efficient trading mechanisms for a large class of markets that do admit such externalities and for bilateral trade markets establishes the impossibility of a first best solution across a class of trading problems employing uniform priors and linear valuation structures this paper also compares levels of market efficiency for varying numbers of traders

individually rational budget balanced mechanisms and allocation of surplus abstract we investigate the issue of implementation via individually rational ex post budget balanced bayesian mechanisms we show that all decision rules generating a nonnegative expected social surplus are implementable via such mechanisms if and only if the probability distribution of the agents type profiles satisfies two conditions the well known condition of cremer and mclean 1988 full extraction of the surplus in bayesian and dominant strategy auctions econometrica 56 1247 1257 and the identifiability condition introduced in this paper we also show that these conditions are necessary for ex post efficiency to be attainable with budget balance and individual rationality and that the expected social surplus in these mechanisms can be distributed in any desirable way lastly we demonstrate that like cremer mclean condition the identifiability condition is generic if there are at least three agents

simple contracts renegotiation under asymmetric information and the hold up problem abstract in this article it is demonstrated that voluntary bargaining over a collective decision under asymmetric information may well lead to ex post efficiency if the default decision is non trivial it is argued that the default decision may be interpreted as a simple contract that the parties have written ex ante this result is used in order to show that simple unconditional contracts which are renegotiated may allow the hold up problem to be solved even if the parties valuations are private information

property rights and efficiency of voluntary bargaining under asymmetric information we show that in public good problems under asymmetric information the success of voluntary bargaining is closely related to the structure of property rights we characterize property rights structures and mediated bargaining procedures that either lead to an efficient voluntary resolution to public good problems or achieve the efficient outcome but slightly coerce the agents into participation in this respect we identify efficient property rights structures in this paper we show that in public good problems under asymmetric information the success of any voluntary bargaining procedure is closely related to the structure of property rights in the economy for clarity of exposition we focus our attention on the following example in a town inhabited by n residents a firm is considering whether to operate a factory that generates pollution as an inevitable by product a higher level of production generates a correspondingly higher level of pollution the firm s profits are increasing with the level of production and the welfare of the residents is decreasing with the level of pollution the firm s profitability and residents preferences are assumed to be private information the structure of property rights specifies the level of pollution that the firm is entitled to emit into the environment for every such economy we describe and prove the existence of efficient property rights structures we characterize property rights structures and voluntary mediated bargaining procedures that maximize the sum of residents utilities and the firm s profit and thus lead to an efficient resolution to the public good problem furthermore we show that these efficient property rights structures are robust to changes in the underlying environment this suggests that the combination of efficiency minded legislation that would set the initial structure of property rights appropriately and a mediator who would base his recommendations on an efficient decision mechanism could facilitate the achievement of the efficient outcome under some circumstances however we show that the mediated voluntary bargaining procedure has to be replaced by compulsory arbitration that coerces agents into agreement we provide results that show that when the efficient property rights structure is adopted the degree of coercion that is necessary to obtain the efficient outcome is small thus in contrast to rob 1989 and mailath and postlewaite 1 our results apply to any public good problem where the costs and benefits of providing the public good are monotonically increasing in the level of provision and where some additional restrictions to be specified later are imposed on the form of the utility and profit functions and on the information structure

robustly coalition proof incentive mechanisms for public good provision are voting mechanisms and vice versa we study the relation between mechanism design and voting in public good provision if incentive mechanisms must satisfy conditions of robust coalition proofness as well as robust incentive compatibility the participants contributions to public good provision can only depend on the level of the public good that is provided and that level can only depend on the population shares of people favouring one level over another for a public good that comes as a single indivisible unit the outcome depends on whether or not the share of votes in favour of provision exceeds a specified threshold with more provision levels for the public good more complicated mechanisms can be used but they still involve the counting of votes rather than any measurement of the participants willingness to pay the article thus provides a foundation for the use of voting mechanisms

pollution claim settlements under private information abstract the classical problem of resolving a nuisance dispute between a pollution generating firm and nearby residents is modelled here as a mechanism design problem we assume that the designer of the mechanism is the firm that it is uncertain about the actual losses suffered by residents and that the initial assignment of property rights is one where each resident is entitled to prevail we derive a profitmaximizing scheme under the individual rationality and incentive compatibility constraints and examine its properties it is shown that the outcomes it yields are sometimes inefficient moreover when many residents are affected by pollution and the degree of uncertainty with respect to the losses they suffer is large these inefficiencies become rampant

performance gender gap does competition matter using data for students undertaking a series of real world academic examinations with high future payoffs we examine whether the differences in these evaluations competitive nature generate a performance gender gap in the univariate setting we find that women s performance is first order stochastically dominated by that of men when the competition is higher whereas the reverse holds true in the less competitive or noncompetitive tests these results are confirmed in the multivariate setting our findings from a real world setting with important payoffs at stake are in line with the evidence from experimental research that finds that females tend to perform worse in more competitive contexts

bargaining orders in a multi person bargaining game abstract this paper studies a complete information bargaining game with one buyer and multiple sellers of different sizes or bargaining strengths the bargaining order is determined endogenously with a finite horizon there is a unique subgame perfect equilibrium outcome in which the buyer purchases in order of increasing size from the smallest to the largest with an infinite horizon if the sellers have sufficiently different sizes there is a unique equilibrium outcome which has the same bargaining order if the sellers have similar sizes with an infinite horizon there may be multiple equilibrium outcomes with different bargaining orders

informational smallness and the scope for limiting information rents abstract for an incomplete information model of public good provision with interim participation constraints we show that efficient outcomes can be approximated with approximately full surplus extraction when there are many agents and each agent is informationally small the result holds even if agents payoffs cannot be unambiguously inferred from their beliefs the contrary result of neeman z neeman the relevance of private information in mechanism design j econ theory 117 2004 55 77 rests on an implicit uniformity requirement that is incompatible with the notion that agents are informationally small because there are many other agents who have information about them

public goods with congestion abstract i consider the problem of the efficient provision of a congested limited capacity public good in a setting with asymmetric information i show in particular that when the capacity of the good is limited in a wide class of economies it is possible to construct an incentive compatible mechanism that always produces the good at the efficient level balances the budget and satisfies voluntary participation constraints this result is in contrast with the corresponding impossibility result for pure public goods due to mailath and postlewaite rev econ stud 57 1990 351 359 and rob j econ theory 47 1989 307 333

membership in citizen groups we analyze the coordination problem of agents deciding to join a group that uses membership revenues to provide a discrete public good and excludable benefits the public good and the benefits are jointly produced so that benefits are valued only if the group succeeds in providing the public good with asymmetric information about the cost of provision the static membership game admits a unique equilibrium and we characterize the optimal membership fee we show that heterogeneity in valuations for the excludable benefits is always detrimental to the group however in a dynamic contest in which heterogeneity arises endogenously returning members receive additional seniority benefits at the expense of junior members we show that in the ex ante optimal contract offering seniority benefits is beneficial for the group despite the heterogeneity in valuations created

inequality control rights and rent seeking sugar cooperatives in maharashtra this paper presents a theory of rent seeking within farmer cooperatives in which inequality of asset ownership affects relative control rights of different groups of members the two key assumptions are constraints on lump sum transfers from poorer members and disproportionate control rights wielded by wealthier members transfers of rents to the latter are achieved by depressing prices paid for inputs supplied by members and diverting resulting retained earnings the theory predicts that increased heterogeneity of landholdings in the local area causes increased inefficiency by inducing a lower input price and a lower level of installed crushing capacity predictions concerning the effect of the distribution of local landownership on sugarcane price capacity levels and participation rates of different classes of farmers are confirmed by data from nearly 100 sugar cooperatives in the indian state of maharashtra over the period 1971 93

markets for ownership the prevailing economic theory of the firm based on a property rights perspective has demonstrated that ownership by dispensable outside parties is an inefficient outcome relative to ownership by productive agents in order to better understand observed patterns of ownership this paper considers the outcome of ma rkets for ownership that operate prior to production taking place the main result is that outside parties will often become the equilibrium asset owners this is precisely because but for ownership such parties would not earn rents in contrast productive agents earn rents even when they do not own assets given that their contribution is complementary with other productive agents their willingness to pay for ownership is less than that of an outside party this result is robust to the introduction of moderate levels of inefficiency arising from outside ownership and to a consideration of opportunities for re sale before production begins the main conclusion drawn is that the nature of the operation of markets for ownership stands alongside incentive effects as important predictors of firm boundaries journal of economic literature classification numbers d23 l22

gender and competition at a young age gender gaps may be observed in a variety of economic and social environments one of the possible determining factors is that men are more competitive than women and so when the competitiveness of the environment increases the performance of men increases relative to that of women we test this hypothesis in a field study conducted with 9 year old children running on a track they first run alone and then in pairs over a short distance with different gender composition of the pairs the results support the hypothesis that performance in competition varies according to gender when children ran alone there was no difference in performance in competition boys but not girls improved their performance this finding relates to the discussion regarding single sex schools the outcomes of examinations in a mixed sex school can show a gender gap in favor of boys even when this gap does not reflect actual abilities girls who are as talented as boys will end up performing worse just because they are not as competitive and will not achieve as high scores in examinations as boys

gender differences in market competitiveness in a real workplace evidence from performance based pay tournaments among teachers recent lab and field experiments suggest that women are less effective than men in a competitive environment in this paper i examine how individual performance in a real work place is affected by a competitive environment and by its gender mix the competition is among math english and language teachers who participated in a rank order tournament that rewarded teachers with large cash bonuses based on the test performance of their classes the evidence suggest that the average ranking winning rate and awarded prize did not differ by gender nor between teachers in competition groups with only female teachers or with both genders i also find that the direct impact of the bonus program on students outcomes did not vary by male and female teachers or by the type of competitive environment in terms of gender mix of the participants as for mechanisms that can explain these results i found no differences by either gender or by the gender mix of the competition group in teachers awareness and familiarity with the program and its rules and in effort and teaching methods women though were more pessimistic about the effectiveness of teachers performance pay and more realistic than men about their likelihood of winning bonuses

cross border externalities and cooperation among representative democracies abstract this paper analyzes the provision of public goods with cross border externalities by representative democracies the level of provision of each country is decided by a policy maker elected by majority rule at the country level we compare the case in which policy makers set their policies noncooperatively with the case in which they set their policies through coasian cooperation cooperation induces policy makers to internalize cross border externalities but it also induces strategic voters to elect a policy maker who cares less about the public good to reduce their public good contribution the former effect increases public good provision while the latter reduces it we show that once voters incentives are taken into account whether cooperation is beneficial depends neither on voters preferences nor on the magnitude of spillovers nor on the size bargaining power or efficiency of each country instead it depends only on the curvature of the demand for the public good cooperation increases decreases public good provision when the demand function is more less convex than the unit elastic demand function hence the desirability of international cooperation depends mostly on the type of public good considered

breakdown in multilateral negotiations abstract we analyze a complete information multilateral bargaining model in which a buyer is to purchase two complementary goods from two sellers binding cash offer contracts are used to govern transactions in contrast to preexisting literature we do not normalize the parties reservation utilities to zero we show that this assumption holds critical importance by demonstrating that a complete breakdown of negotiations may occur as the unique equilibrium outcome even if only two sellers are present

do women shy away from competition do men compete too much we examine whether men and women of the same ability differ in their selection into a competitive environment participants in a laboratory experiment solve a real task first under a noncompetitive piece rate and then a competitive tournament incentive scheme although there are no gender differences in performance men select the tournament twice as much as women when choosing their compensation scheme for the next performance while 73 percent of the men select the tournament only 35 percent of the women make this choice this gender gap in tournament entry is not explained by performance and factors such as risk and feedback aversion only playa negligible role instead the tournament entry gap is driven by men being more overconfident and by gender differences in preferences for performing in a competition the result is that women shy away from competition and men embrace it

on the equivalence of bayesian and dominant strategy implementation we consider a standard social choice environment with linear utilities and independent one dimensional private types we prove that for any bayesian incentive compatible mechanism there exists an equivalent dominant strategy incentive compatible mechanism that delivers the same interim expected utilities for all agents and the same ex ante expected social surplus the short proof is based on an extension of an elegant result due to gutmann kemperman reeds and shepp 1991 we also show that the equivalence between bayesian and dominant strategy implementation generally breaks down when the main assumptions underlying the social choice model are relaxed or when the equivalence concept is strengthened to apply to interim expected allocations

the governance of exchanges members cooperatives versus outside ownership the paper compares co operative governance structure to outside ownership the distinction between the two lies in who has residual rights of control it is found that a co operative becomes relatively less efficient as the environment becomes more competitive and the interests of members become more skewed these ideas are applied to the governance of exchanges this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

workers versus firms bargaining over a firm s value we introduce a distinction between a firm and its network of workers in a competitive world if networks are easily lured away the workers must receive the entire value of their contribution to the firm how then can service firms have equity value a model is analysed in which workers are paid less as a group than their value even in a competitive world the workers are assumed to have a nonwage benefit for working at the current firm this benefit is privately known these privately known benefits make it impossible for the workers to agree on a division of their value should they leave the existing firm for a new enterprise the result is that the workers may receive a total compensation that is less than their contribution to the firm

oil field unitization contractual failure in the presence of imperfect information an empirical analysis of the impact of transaction costs on contracting shows that imperfect in formation can seriously limit the effectiveness of private contracting the case under study is the widespread failure of private crude oil producing firms to use us oil fields to reduce rent dissipation rent dissipation follows as multiple firms compete for migratory oil in common oil pools unitization is the obvious private contractual solution to rent dissipation the authors argue that despite large net gains from unitization imperfect information and information asymmetries among the negotiating parties regarding lease values prevents consensus on unit shares as a result contracts are often not completed or only fragmented units are completed 9 references 1 figure 4 tables

voter participation and strategic uncertainty the paradox of not voting is examined in a model where voters have uncertainty about the preferences and costs of other voters in game theoretic models of voter participation under complete information equilibrium outcomes can have substantial turnout even when voting costs are relatively high in contrast when uncertainty about preferences and costs is present only voters with negligible or negative net voting costs participate when the electorate is large

gender gap in performance under competitive pressure admissions to czech universities uri gneezy muriel niederle and aldo rustichini 2003 presented experimental evi dence suggesting that women are less effective than men in competitive environments even if they perform similarly well in noncompeti tive settings such gender performance gaps under competition could help explain the near absence of women from top level manage rial positions which are awarded in repeated tournaments field data are now being used to test for the presence of such gaps in par ticular the competitive nature of the education process offers several testing opportunities as illustrated by e g joseph price 2008 in educational psychology studies women tend to report higher levels of exam anxiety see e g douglas a bors francois vigneau and antonia kronlund 2006 muriel niederle and lise vesterlund 2010 suggest that the large gender gap in mathematics performance may in part be explained by the differential manner in which men and women respond to competitive test taking environments evren ors frederic palomino and eloic peyrache 2008 study the performance of applicants to a top ranked french business school they show that within

cartel enforcement with uncertainty about costs what cartel agreements are possible when firms have private information about production costs in order for a cartel agreement to work it must take into account the incentives for firms to misrepresent their cost information and it must provide sufficient reward so that no firm wishes to defect for private cost uncertainty we characterize the set of cartel agreements with side payments that can be supported as bayesian nash equilibria we show that if defection results in either cournot or bertrand competition the incentive problems in large cartels are severe enough to prevent the cartel from achieving the monopoly outcome in contrast with common cost uncertainty the incentive problems become less severe in large cartels allowing perfect collusion

provision of a public good with bounded cost abstract we provide a sufficient condition for the expected aggregate contribution to a public good to be bounded independently of the size of the population

confining the coase theorem contracting ownership and free riding if individuals own the right to take any action that they please and are free to contract about behaviour will outcomes be efficient in all situations that is does the coase theorem hold we study this classic question through the lens of a non cooperative model of contract negotiations considering both compulsory and voluntary participation in negotiations in either case we find that all consistent equilibria of the contracting game are efficient in the case of two players but if participation is voluntary and there are more than two players there are situations in which all consistent equilibria are inefficient specifically the provision of public goods tends to be inefficiently low due to strategic abstention from contracting free riding on others agreements can be avoided if individuals do not own all their actions when actions involve the use of assets efficient action ownership may correspond to collective rather than individual asset ownership

can decentralization be beneficial abstract a conventional justification for government hierarchy in the fiscal federalism literature is based upon asymmetry in policy tools or in information access that is available to different levels of government this paper demonstrates that even if these asymmetries are eliminated addition of local regional governments to a one tier central government can be strictly welfare improving

moral hazard and cooperation abstract we consider a situation in which a principal hires two agents whose cooperation is profitable from a technical point of view the characteristics of the optimal contract are strongly dependent on the agents commitment capacity that allows them to reach more efficient outcomes

public goods with ambiguity in large economies abstract we consider a canonical problem in economics the financing and provision of a public good mailath and postlewaite 1990 show that under natural information and enforcement frictions the probability of providing the public good falls to zero as the population size goes to infinity even if provision of the public good is efficient in this paper we allow agents to have multiple prior beliefs about others valuations and to make choices that reflect their aversion to that ambiguity we show that as long as each agent s set of priors contains some distribution of valuations under which provision is inefficient it is possible to find a mechanism in large economies that finances provision of the public good

estimating the benefit of high school for university bound students evidence of subject specific human capital accumulation numerous studies suggest that the value of high school education is large for potential dropouts yet we know much less about the benefits for students who will go on to post secondary education to help fill this gap i measure using a recent ontario high school reform the value added in terms of university grades of an extra year of high school mathematics for university bound students the estimated benefit is small for these students 2 3 points on a 100 point scale this evidence helps to explain why the literature has found only modest effects of taking more mathematics in high school on wages mesurer les avantages de l ecole secondaire pour les etudiants qui se destinent a l universite resultats pour une analyse de l accumulation de capital humain dans des cours specifiques de nombreuses etudes suggerent que la valeur de l education secondaire est grande pour les decrocheurs potentiels par contre on en sait beaucoup moins sur les avantages pour les etudiants qui continuent leurs etudes au niveau postsecondaire pour examiner cette question on mesure la valeur ajoutee en termes de notes a l universite d une annee supplementaire de mathematiques au secondaire pour les etudiants qui vont a l universite a l aide de donnees pour les cohortes differentes engendrees par une recente reforme en ontario il semble que l avantage est minime pour ces etudiants 2 3 points sur une echelle de 100 ces resultats aident a expliquer pourquoi la litterature specialisee n a decouvert que de modestes effets de mathematiques supplementaires au secondaire sur les niveaux de salaires

the gender of opponents explaining gender differences in performance and risk taking abstract analyzing 8169 contestants over 32 years of the us game show jeopardy we find that women compete more aggressively become marginally more competitive and take on more risk when paired against men specifically a woman is more likely to win a jeopardy episode and within the show to respond to a clue once responding she is also marginally more likely to respond correctly potentially most surprising even the sizeable gender gap in risk taking analyzing daily double wagering decisions disappears once a woman competes in an otherwise all male field of competitors men on the other hand wager significantly less when paired against women only but the gender of opponents does not affect their competitive performance otherwise our rich sample allows us to control for a host of potentially confounding factors and player fixed effects thereby eliminating potential biases from unobservable individual characteristics our findings are consistent with an explanation that emphasizes an adaptation to social norms applied to gender

bretton woods blueprint for a greenhouse gas agreement abstract this paper describes the remarkable parallels between the problems faced in the drafting of the 1944 bretton woods agreement which established the rules and institutions governing the international financial system and the problems faced in drafting a greenhouse gas agreement the parallels include the need to induce countries to sacrifice economic sovereignty in order to provide a public good the need to facilitate capital investment and provide adjustment loans to be fair to developing versus developed nations to offer technical assistance monitor behavior punish offenders and promote a globally efficient allocation of resources it is claimed that between them the organizations which emerged from the bretton woods agreement namely the imf gatt and world bank have the necessary attributes of the needed global atmospheric control agency furthermore it is argued that there are striking parallels between the reserve accounts at the imf and the crediting and debiting of greenhouse gas emissions and absorptions between special drawing rights sdrs and rights for greenhouse gas emissions as well as in numerous other characteristics the paper concludes by noting that the almost half century of influence of the bretton woods institutions suggests we might borrow from their charters organizational designs membership incentives and procedures for adaptation and change

asymmetric information bargaining problems with many agents a yes or no decision must be made about some issue all agents must agree the coase theorem asserts that the efficient outcome will always result suppose the value positive or negative that an individual attaches to an affirmative decision is privately known to that individual it is proved under very mild conditions that with independent types as the number of agents increases the probability of an affirmative efficient decision goes to zero an example in which it is common knowledge that an affirmative decision is efficient and yet the probability of such a decision goes to zero is given

public goods participation constraints and democracy a possibility theorem abstract it is well known that ex post efficient mechanisms for the provision of indivisible public goods are not interim individually rational however the corresponding literature assumes that agents who veto a mechanism can enforce a situation in which the public good is never provided this paper instead considers majority voting with uniform cost sharing as the relevant status quo efficient mechanisms may then exist which also satisfy all agents interim participation constraints in this case ex post inefficient voting mechanisms can be replaced by efficient ones without reducing any individual s expected utility intuitively agents with a low willingness to pay have to contribute more under majority rule than under an efficient mechanism with a balanced budget although this possibility theorem is not universal in the sense of schweizer 2006 an asymptotic possibility is obtained for certain type distributions

full extraction of the surplus in bayesian and dominant strategy auctions we consider auctions for a single indivisible object in the case where the bidders have information about each other which is not available to the seller we show that the seller can use this information to his own benefit and we completely characterize the environ ments in which a well chosen auction gives him the same expected payoff as that obtainable were he able to sell the object with full information about each bidder s willingness to pay we provide this characterization for auctions in which the bidders have dominant strate gies and for those where the relevant equilibrium concept is bayesian nash in both set ups the existence of these auctions hinges on the possibility of constructing lotteries with the correct properties we consider the situation in which an agent the seller possesses one indivisible unit of a good to which he attaches no value but the good has value to a number of potential buyers and its transfer to one of them would increase social welfare in particular the transfer to the buyer with the highest valuation maximizes social welfare in this paper we completely characterize environments in which the seller can design an auction that will enable him to capture for himself the full increase in social welfare induced by the transfer of the good to the bidder with the highest willingness to pay if the seller had full information about the reservation prices of potential buyers his optimal selling strategy would be very simple he would announce a price equal or very close to the highest reservation value the optimal strategy for the bidder with the highest evaluation would be to accept the offer note that we are treating a situation in which the seller can commit himself to a price as a result of the exchange the utility of the seller increases by the full amount of the increase in social welfare and he has been able to fully extract the surplus in many circumstances however a seller has only imperfect knowledge of the buyers willingnesses to pay in this case he must find some mechanism or auction which will enable him to maximize his benefit from the sale of the object the auction literature starts with this observation and shows how the seller can by an astute choice of auction extract the largest possible fraction of the surplus in general the literature has shown that this proportion is strictly less than one in some circumstances the bidders will have information about each other which is not available to the seller for instance in auctions for petroleum drilling rights bidders know the results of geological tests which they have

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

performance in competitive environments gender differences even though the provision of equal opportunities for men and women has been a priority in many countries large gender differences prevail in competitive high ranking positions suggested explanations include discrimination and differences in preferences and human capital in this paper we present experimental evidence in support of an additional factor women may be less effective than men in competitive environments even if they are able to perform similarly in non competitive environments in a laboratory experiment we observe as we increase the competitiveness of the environment a significant increase in performance for men but not for women this results in a significant gender gap in performance in tournaments while there is no gap when participants are paid according to piece rate this effect is stronger when women have to compete against men than in single sex competitive environments this suggests that women may be able to perform in competitive environments per se

do men and women respond differently to competition evidence from a major education reform this paper provides new evidence of gender differences in response to increased competition focusing on important life tasks performed in a regular social environment the analysis takes advantage of a major education reform in ontario that exogenously increased competition for university grades comparing students prereform and postreform using rich administrative data i find that male average grades and the proportion of male students graduating on time increased relative to females further the evidence indicates that these changes were due to increased relative effort rather than self selection the findings have implications for the delivery of education and incentive provision more generally

the rate at which a simple market converges to efficiency as the number of traders increases an asymptotic result for optimal trading mechanisms private information in an independent private values market provides incentives to traders to manipulate equilibrium prices strategically this strategic behavior precludes ex post efficient market performance increasing the number of traders improves the efficiency of some trading mechanisms by enabling them to better utilize the private information traders bids and offers reveal this paper shows that the expected inefficiency of optimally designed mechanisms relative to ex post efficient allocations decreases almost quadratically as the number of traders increases

the incentive effects of affirmative action in a real effort tournament abstract affirmative action policies bias tournament rules in order to provide equal opportunities to a group of competitors who have a disadvantage they cannot be held responsible for its implementation affects the underlying incentive structure which might induce lower performance by participants and additionally result in a selected pool of tournament winners that is less efficient in this paper we study the empirical validity of such concerns in a case where the disadvantage affects capacities to compete we conducted real effort tournaments between pairs of children from two similar schools who systematically differed in how much training they received ex ante on the task at hand contrary to the expressed concerns our results show that the implementation of affirmative action did not result in a significant performance loss for either advantaged or disadvantaged subjects instead it rather enhanced the performance for a large group of participants moreover affirmative action resulted in a more equitable tournament winner pool where half of the selected tournament winners came from the originally disadvantaged group hence the negative selection effects due to the biased tournament rules were at least partially offset by performance enhancing incentive effects

public good provision with many participants for a nonexcludable public good with benefit and cost functions independent of the number of participants this paper studies second best allocations under bayesian interim incentive compatibility and interim individual rationality as the number of participants becomes large second best provision levels converge in distribution to first best levels if the latter are bounded second best provision levels become large in absolute terms but small relative to first best levels if benefit and cost functions are isoelastic in contrast for an excludable public good the ratio of second best to first best levels is bounded away from zero

efficiency of large double auctions we consider large double auctions with private values values need be neither symmetric nor independent multiple units may be owned or desired participation may be stochastic we introduce a very mild notion of a little independence we prove that all nontrivial equilibria of auctions that satisfy this notion are asymptotically efficient for any alpha 0 inefficiency disappears at rate 1 n 2 alpha