the problem of multiple commons a market design approach abstract there are several locations each of which is endowed with a resource that is specific to that location each agent will go to a single location and harvest some of the resource there several agents may go to each location and thereby cause a congestion effect that is modeled in a general way we assign harvesting rights based on preferences alone though we later extend the model to accommodate private endowments of money we find the best allocation rule in the class of rules that are strategy proof anonymous and that satisfy a weak continuity property for a special class of preferences we also find an ascending mechanism similar to an auction that implements the rule the rule coincides with a special pseudo market equilibrium wherein agents buy their desired resource with tokens distributed by the social planner

constrainedly fair job assignments under minimum wages a number of jobs are to be assigned to a greater number of workers while having to abide by the law of minimum wages firms must determine who should be assigned which job and at what salary in such situations fair envy free allocations usually fail to exist to cope with this situation this paper proposes a new concept of fairness called constrained fairness among the set of constrainedly fair allocations the so called constrainedly fair and minimal allocations are of particular interest the reason for this is that the salaries are not only compatible with the minimum wages they are also optimal from the standpoint of cost minimizing firms and the assignment of jobs is efficient from the viewpoint of workers a convergent dynamic procedure that identifies constrainedly fair and minimal allocations is proposed furthermore strategic properties of the mechanism are derived and two notions of efficiency are evaluated

reply to white foreign aid taxes and public investment a further comment our paper presented and estimated a rather straightforward model of policymaker behavior in examining how developing countries allocate the foreign aid they receive in part our contribution was methodological refocussing the issue of aid impacts on intermediate short run variables and shifting the study of aid impacts from cross country to the analysis of behavior in a single country the paper has many obvious shortcomings the over restrictive formulation of the policy maker preference function and the constraints placed on their behavior the difficulty in empirically measuring the theoretical variables including the formulation of the targets by policy makers the assumed exogeneity of aid and interpreting time series estimates in light of the short run nature of the theoretical model our compromises we felt were reasonable and we explicitly laid out all the steps we followed in hopes that others if they found this approach interesting would improve on our methodology the comment by white illustrates some of these short comings but does little to improve on our analysis here we highlight some of the major issues he raises white repeats the valid theoretical criticism by binh and mcgillivray 1993 of the loss function we employed though as we point our in our reply gang and khan 1993 their alternative loss function empirically works out to not including a constant term in our estimating equations we also point out that the way forward is not through the problematic quadratic loss function but through the use of an asymmetric loss function or more flexible functional forms

the vcg auction in theory and practice abstract we describe two auction forms for search engine advertising and present two simple theoretical results concerning i the estimation of click through rates and ii how to adjust the auctions for broad match search we also describe some of the practical issues involved in implementing a vcg auction

new hedonic technique for estimating attribute demand an application to the demand for automobile fuel efficiency a new hedonic procedure is applied to estimate the effects of gasoline price on the demand for automobile attributes and fuel efficiency direct application of a comparative statics analysis circumvents the problems of identification and severe multicollinearity affecting previous hedonic studies the results indicate that the effect of induced changes in automobile attributes in response to increases in the price of gasoline is to substantially increase fuel efficiency the estimated elasticities of fuel efficiency with respect to the price of gasoline imply that the long run own price elasticity of demand for gasoline is greater than unity 31 references

aid and the public sector in pakistan evidence with endogenous aid summary aid has been the principal source of development finance for the majority of developing countries over the past few decades this has spawned a large literature on the effectiveness of aid which remains essentially inconclusive the empirical literature has tended to evaluate the impact of aid by including it as a variable in a regression for the determinants of some economic performance indicator this paper follows a different strand of the literature and examines the impact of aid on public sector fiscal behavior aid is in general given to the public sector thus any effect of aid is mediated by that sector we specifically address this behavioral feature by analyzing how aid revenue affects government fiscal behavior with respect to tax borrowing and expenditure decisions unlike previous contributions aid is endogenous in our model which has a number of important implications we estimate an econometric model that differs from previous studies not only in this respect but also by allowing domestic borrowing in addition to aid and tax revenue to finance both capital and recurrent expenditure structural and reduced form equations are derived and estimated using 1956 95 time series data for pakistan results indicate contrary to much of the literature that only half of aid has gone to government consumption that it has had a slightly positive impact on public investment and negative impact on tax effort

foreign aid and fiscal governance in melanesia summary recent research suggests that foreign aid is effective at spurring economic growth in recipient countries but its effectiveness is likely to depend upon a number of factors arguably the most important factor determining aid effectiveness is how recipient governments mediate foreign aid inflows this paper investigates this issue for the melanesian countries of fiji papua new guinea the solomon islands and vanuatu for the period 1989 2002 results suggest that foreign aid has led to increases in developmental expenditures and to falls in tax revenues and borrowing results also suggest a very different response to aid grants versus loans

rates of time preference and consumer valuations of automobile safety and fuel efficiency this article estimates hedonic price models for automobiles using a data set on almost 3 000 households from the u s department of energy residential transportation energy consumption survey the standard hedonic models are generalized to recognize the role of discounting of fuel efficiency and safety yielding an estimated rate of time preference ranging from 11 to 17 percent this range includes the prevailing rate of interest for car loans in 1988 and is consequently consistent with market rates purchasers exhibit an implicit value of life ranging from 2 6 to 3 7 million which is within the range found in the labor market as well as other market contexts the model also estimates a significant price effect for auto injury risks and fuel efficiency

comparative statics in matching markets abstract this paper studies the comparative statics of adding agents to matching markets that generalize the marriage and college admissions markets of d gale and l shapley amer math monthly 69 1962 9 15 it is shown for the wide class of matching markets studied by a roth econometrica 52 1984 47 57 that adding an agent to one side of the market weakens the competitive positions of the other agents on that side and strengthens the competitive positions of the agents on the other side

foreign aid taxes and public investment abstract using time series data for india we test the foreign aid public investment hypothesis behavioral equations derived from a maximizing framework are estimated after correcting for econometric and data inadequacies of earlier models the results confirm earlier findings regarding the negative relationship between taxes and government investment in the presence of aid however in contrast to the earlier work we find that grants and loans generally go into development projects with no leakages into consumption moreover bilateral aid actually pulls resources out of consumption and puts them into development projects

comparative reliability of the dichotomous choice and open ended contingent valuation techniques abstract the comparative reliability of dichotomous choice and open ended contingent valuation methods cvm is evaluated by resurvey of the same households 9 months after their original survey test retest correlations on willingness to pay are statistically significant at the 1 level and range from 0 57 for the dichotomous choice cvm to 0 62 for the open ended cvm the test retest correlations were not statistically different between dichotomous choice and open ended cvm a likelihood ratio test for temporal stability of each method s willingness to pay functions indicates stability half of the time for both methods

the strategy structure of some coalition formation games in coalitional games with side payments the core predicts which coalitions form and how benefits are shared the predictions however run into difficulties if the core is empty or if some coalitions benefit from not blocking truthfully these difficulties are analyzed in games in which an a priori given collection of coalitions can form as the collection of pairs of buyer seller in an assignment game the incentive properties of the core and of its selections are investigated in function of the collection furthermore the relationships with vickrey clarke groves mechanisms are drawn

valuing environmental commodities some recent experiments a general model of consumer behavior is proposed to assess six recent experiments that have attempted to reveal preferences for environmental goals each experiment used a mix of both the techniques and the theory of demand for non market commodities and each was designed to estimate a non market attitude associated with the environment and to analyze potential biases in the techniques the six cases show some consistency in results the linkage within the contingent market between the environmental attribute institutional setting and the bidding instrument must be realistic and accepted by the respondent to avoid biased results possibly the most important result is the replication of results using a traditional property value study and a contingent bidding approach all evidence obtained to date suggests that hedonic studies of property values or wages travel costs and survey techniques all yield values well one order of magnitude in accuracy 41 references 2 tables

online ad auctions i describe how search engines sell ad space using an auction i analyze advertiser behavior in this context using elementary price theory and derive a simple way to estimate the producer surplus generated by online search advertising it appears that the estimated value of online advertising tends to be between 2 and 2 3 times advertising expenditures jel d44 auctions d21 firm behavior

the econometrics and some properties of separable matching models we present a class of one to one matching models with perfectly transferable utility we discuss identification and inference in these separable models and we show how their comparative statics are readily analyzed

automobile prices and quality did the gasoline price increases change consumer tastes in the u s a hedonic model of automobile prices that takes gasoline costs into account is developed and used to examine whether gasoline price increases especially those related to the 1973 and 1979 oil shocks changed consumer evaluations of the relative qualities of used cars in the u s during 1970 1981 we test the null hypothesis that the characteristics coefficients remained constant over time it is rejected if gasoline costs are excluded from the model but not if they are included alternative approaches are developed to show that the gasoline price increases alone can explain much of the observed changes in the coefficients

willingness to pay and price elasticities of demand for energy efficient appliances combining the hedonic approach and demand systems abstract this article proposes a combined approach for estimating willingness to pay for the attributes represented by energy efficiency labels and providing reliable price elasticities of demand own and cross for close substitutes e g those with low energy efficiency and those with higher energy efficiency this is done by using the results of the hedonic approach together with the quantity based demand system qbds model the elasticity results obtained with the latter are then compared with those simulated using the linear almost ideal demand system la aids the methodology is applied to the dishwasher market in spain it is found that 15 6 of the final price is actually paid for the energy efficiency attribute this accounts for about 80 of the average market price the elasticity results confirm that energy efficient appliances are more price elastic than regular ones

elicitation of honest preferences for the assignment of individuals to positions the problem of eliciting honest preferences from individuals who must be assigned to a set of positions is considered individuals know that they will be charged for the positions to which they are assigned a set of prices that provide no incentive for the individual to misrepresent his preferences is suggested it is shown that these prices constitute an element of the optimal solution to the dual of a linear programming assignment problem both the optimal allocation and the prices to be charged can be derived by solving two linear programming problems once preferences have been elicited the procedure can usefully be viewed as a simulation of a competitive market under conditions where such a market cannot be expected to function well it results in an efficient allocation where all resources are valued at their opportunity costs and consumer surplus is maximized its outcome thus has the desirable properties of competitive market equilibria

an algorithm for identifying fair and optimal allocations the concept of a fair and optimal allocation was recently introduced by sun and yang sun n yang z 2003 a general strategy proof fair allocation mechanism economics letters 81 73 79 this note states some basic properties of fair and optimal allocations and provides a simple algorithm for identifying them c 2007 elsevier b v all fights reserved

foreign aid taxes and public investment a further comment abstract the paper in this journal by gang and khan 1991 employed heller s 1975 fiscal response model to demonstrate that aid to india has all been used to finance government investment this conclusion is shown to be a misinterpretation of the model s results which actually suggest that aid has had no impact on government investment at all however the reported parameters are determined by the estimation procedure adopted by gang and khan and not by the indian government s fiscal behaviour

strategy proof house allocation with price restrictions abstract this paper considers a house allocation problem with no initial ownership and where prices are bounded from below and above by exogenously given price restrictions this type of housing market contains e g the assignment market and the student placement problem as special cases a mechanism called the minimal rpe mechanism is defined and two main results are obtained first it is demonstrated that the mechanism is manipulable at some profile in the full preference domain r second it is proved that there is a subset r r of the full domain containing almost all profiles in r such that the minimal rpe mechanism is strategy proof in that subset

measuring product prices under conditions of quality change the case of passenger cars in greece the envelope curve of the bid functions for car characteristics in greece is used to analyze the relationship between nominal and quality adjusted car prices for 1965 85 it is estimated using the box cox flexible functional form technique in a modification of s rosen s hedonic price model the authors find that quality adjusted prices of imports from west germany france italy and japan decline d from 1965 to 1970 and increased continuously thereafter the quality of cars from france italy and to a lesser extent japan responded favorably following the two oil shocks and low priced cars offer more quality for money copyright 1988 by blackwell publishing ltd

an empirical model of product design and pricing strategy abstract using the hedonic approach as a point of departure this paper develops an empirical model for analyzing product design and pricing strategies the model focuses on a multi product firm in a differentiated product market it identifies criteria for optimal design and pricing for the firm s several products given the firm s production costs the prices and designs of competing products and given consumer tastes the model is demonstrated with a real world application to the microcomputer industry

gasoline prices fuel economy and the energy paradox abstract policymakers often assert that consumers undervalue future gasoline costs when they buy automobiles we test this by measuring whether relative prices of vehicles with different fuel economy ratings fully adjust to variation in gasoline prices vehicle prices move as if consumers are indifferent between 1 00 in discounted future gas cost and 0 76 in vehicle purchase price we show how corrections for endogenous market shares and utilization measurement error and different gasoline price forecasts affect the results we also provide unique evidence of sticky information vehicle markets respond to changes in gasoline prices with up to a six month delay

maximal manipulation of envy free solutions in economies with indivisible goods and money abstract we consider the problem of the fair allocation of indivisible goods and money with non quasi linear preferences the purpose of the present study is to examine strategic manipulation under envy free solutions we show that under a certain domain richness condition each individual obtains the welfare level of his optimal envy free allocation by maximally manipulating the solutions this maximal manipulation theorem is helpful in analyzing the set of nash equilibrium allocations in the direct revelation games associated with a given envy free solution if an envy free solution satisfies a mild condition the set of nash equilibrium allocations in its associated direct revelation game coincides with that of envy free allocations

transferring ownership of public housing to existing tenants a market design approach this paper explores a housing market with an existing tenant in each house and where the existing tenants initially rent their houses the idea is to identify equilibrium prices for the housing market given the prerequisite that a tenant can buy any house on the housing market including the one that he is currently possessing or continue renting the house he is currently occupying the main contribution is the identification of an individually rational equilibrium selecting and group non manipulable price mechanism in a restricted preference domain that contains almost all preference profiles in this restricted domain the identified mechanism is the minimum price equilibrium selecting mechanism that transfers the maximum number of ownerships to the existing tenants we also relate the theoretical model and the main findings to the u k housing act 1980 whose main objective is to transfer ownerships of houses to existing tenants

hiring procedures to implement stable allocations abstract we implement the stable correspondence of a job matching market in subgame perfect equilibrium we use a simple sequential mechanism in which firms propose a salary to each worker first stage and then each worker accepts at most one proposal second stage moreover if agents preferences are additive this mechanism implements in subgame perfect equilibrium the firms optimal corre spondence when firms use undominated strategies finally we construct another simple sequential mechanism where the order of decisions is permuted and which implements the workers optimal correspondence when agents preferences are additive journal of economic literature classification numbers c78 d78

on vickrey type auction procedures abstract although a vickrey type auction provides a dominant strategy for every buyer bidder even in a multi item setting a seller can manipulate the auction this paper attempts to show that the manipulation can be avoided by suitably modifying the initial price vector

fair by design multidimensional envy free mechanisms abstract we address the common scenario where a group of agents wants to divide a set of items fairly and at the same time seeks to optimize a global goal suppose that each item is a task and we want to find an allocation that minimizes the completion time of the last task in an envy free manner where no agent prefers anyone else s allocated task bundle over its own this optimization goal is called makespan minimization and the agents are often treated as machines we give tight deterministic bounds for 1 two unrelated machines and 2 m 2 related machines a natural question to ask is whether envy free pricing techniques can improve the current known bounds for truthful mechanisms for the task scheduling problem studied in the seminal paper of nisan and ronen 2001 we find that for two unrelated machines envy free in expectation is a far weaker constraint i e less restrictive than truthful in expectation

the package assignment model we study assignment problems where individuals trade packages consisting of several rather than single objects although buyers reservations values are non additive efficient assignments can be formulated as a linear programming problem in which the pricing functions expressing duality may be non linear in the objects constituting the packages the interconnections among the linear programming formulation walrasian equilibrium and the core are established in the single seller auction version a necessary and sufficient condition is given for the vickrey payoff point to be implementable by a pricing equilibrium journal of economic literature classification numbers c62 d44 d51

planning and housing supply in two speed britain modelling local market outcomes summary economic research on uk housing markets has only recently got to grips with measuring and modelling the impact of planning and other public interventions although their importance has long been recognised in theory the interurban panel dataset utilised in this study does represent a step forward by permitting more robust econometric estimation and by incorporating a wider more balanced range of determinant factors a coherent set of relationships governing the key market outcomes house prices new building migration and vacancies can be established the modelling framework is used to explore differences in behavioural responses between markets in high and low demand states simulations are used to track the impact on market outcomes of different policy strategies applied in different types of locality supply measures needed to achieve national targets for house price growth reduction are assessed measures acting on both demand side and supply side variables in areas of high and low demand are compared these suggest that output is more sensitive than price to policies and that quite strong concerted policies would be needed to impact significantly on the major market imbalances currently seen

the cost of fuel economy in the indian passenger vehicle market to investigate how fuel economy is valued in the indian car market we compute the cost to indian consumers of purchasing a more fuel efficient vehicle and compare it to the benefit of lower fuel costs over the life of the vehicle we estimate hedonic price functions for four market segments petrol hatchbacks diesel hatchbacks petrol sedans and diesel sedans to compute 95 confidence intervals for the marginal cost to the consumer for an increase in fuel economy we find that the associated present value of fuel savings falls within the 95 confidence interval for most specifications in all market segments for the years 2002 through 2006 thus we fail to consistently reject the hypothesis that consumers appropriately value fuel economy

time horizons lattice structures and welfare in multi period matching markets abstract we analyze a t period two sided one to one matching market without monetary transfers under natural restrictions on agents preferences which accommodate switching costs status quo bias and other forms of inter temporal complementarity dynamically stable matchings exist we propose a new ordering of the stable set ensuring that it forms a lattice we investigate the robustness of dynamically stable matchings with respect to the market s time horizon and frequency of rematching opportunities

sequential rules for house allocation with price restrictions this paper considers a housing market with price restrictions on such markets the existence of a unique minimum rationing equilibrium price vector has been established for each preference profile on a general preference domain that contains almost all preference profiles this vector can be used as a key ingredient in a direct and strategy proof allocation mechanism the main contribution of this paper is to provide two price sequences one with increasing prices and one with decreasing prices that both terminate to a minimal rationing equilibrium price vector in a finite number of steps these sequences are demonstrated to play key roles in an english auction and a dutch auction respectively for the considered housing market with price restrictions less

price premium for high efficiency refrigerators and calculation of price elasticities for close substitutes a methodology using hedonic pricing and demand systems this article uses the hedonic pricing method to estimate the price premium paid for the highest energy efficiency label a in the refrigerators market of the basque autonomous community spain the estimated figure is 8 9 of the final price or about 60 euro which represents one third of the energy savings that a consumer gets during the lifetime of a refrigerator with the highest energy efficiency label this figure is then combined with the linear version of the almost ideal demand system la aids to obtain own and cross price elasticities of demand the information presented here is useful for policy design and analysis the results indicate that the demand for refrigerators with the highest energy efficiency label is highly sensitive to price variations

a simple selling and buying procedure abstract for the assignment game we analyze the following mechanism sellers simultaneously fix their prices first then buyers sequentially decide which object to buy also each buyer may report his or her indifferences along with the previous buyers indifferences to the following buyer the first phase determines the potential prices while the second phase determines the actual matching reporting truthfully the indifferences is always a dominant strategy for the buyers moreover when buyers state their true indifferences the subgame perfect equilibria outcomes of the mechanism correspond to the maximum equilibrium price vector together with optimal matchings journal of economic literature classification numbers c78 d78

too good to fire non assortative matching to play a dynamic game abstract we model stable non assortative labor market matchings we endogenize how transferable utility is a matched firm and worker play an infinite horizon game with one sided moral hazard becker s 1973 result that complementarity yields positively assortative matching fails because increasing match quality harms dynamic incentives a firm cannot credibly threaten to fire a worker who is productive even with low effort thus firms may prefer lower type workers who will exert more effort we offer a new interpretation of efficiency wages committing to a high wage improves effort incentives indirectly by increasing the firm s willingness to walk away we also show that the set of stable outcomes has a lattice structure

unobservables in consumer choice residential energy and the demand for comfort a model of consumption of residential energy in dwellings is developed distinguishing between attributes of housing that provide direct benefits to consumers and attributes that serve as inputs in the production of final goods for example the thermal comfort of dwellings empirical estimates are made of the mode based upon the annual housing survey and the results are used to calculate the effects of changes in energy prices on the consumption of housing residential energy and other goods the analysis suggests that the adjustment process within the housing market permits a great deal of substitution in response to energy price changes copyright 1989 by mit press

using contingent valuation to value environmental improvements alternative methods available to economists for valuing non market goods are outlined contingent valuation is then used to value a ban on straw burning

valuing public goods a comparison of survey and hedonic approaches although the theory of public goods has progressed rapidly since paul samuelson s seminal article the empirical measurement of the value of demand for public goods only recently has received increased attention perhaps the best known and most widely accepted empirical approach has been the use of hedonic prices wherein for example it is assumed that either wages or housing values reflect spatial variation in public good characteristics of different communities this indirect approach based on theoretical work of charles tiebout kelvin lancaster sherwin rosen and others has proven quite successful among public goods or bads which have been valued using the hedonic approach are climate i hoch air pollution robert anderson and thomas crocker d harrison and d rubinfeld social infrastructure r cummings et al and other community characteristics such as noise level j nelson and ethnic composition ann schnare an alternative approach is to directly ask households or individuals to state their willingness to pay for public goods using survey techniques despite arguments that strategic bias will invalidate survey results there exists the need for an alternative to the hedonic approach as an example consider the case of a remote and unique scenic vista valuable to recreators which is threatened by air pollution from a proposed coal fired plant a typical situation in the western united states although it is possible in principle to impute the value of clean air and visibility from the relative decline in local visitation which might follow construction of a power plant information on the value of visibility at the site is needed prior to construction for socially optimal decision making on plant location and pollution control equipment the hedonic approach is unavailable both because the scarcity of local population as opposed to recreators makes use of wage or property value data impossible and because scenic vistas may themselves be unique for these reasons a randall et al first applied survey methods for valuing visibility and other environmental effects of large coal fired power plants in the four corners region of new mexico since this initial application the survey approach has been widely used to value environmental commodities where market data for hedonic analysis is difficult to acquire see for example brookshire ives and schulze rowe et al brookshire et al other early attempts to value public goods using the survey approach include r davis peter bohm and j hammack and g brown although results of using the survey approach for estimating the value of public goods appear to be internally consistent replicable and consistent with demand theory see schulze et al little work on external validation has been reported thus the purpose of this paper is to report on an experiment designed to validate the survey approach by direct comparison to a hedonic property value study the los angeles metropolitan area was chosen for the experiment because of the well defined air pollution problem and be assistant professor university of wyoming assistant professor university of missouri rolla associate professor university of wyoming and professor university of wyoming respectively the research reported here was funded under a grant methods development for assessing air pollution control benefits from the u s environmental protection agency we would like to give special thanks to alan carlin and shelby gerking for their helpful suggestions and contributions additional helpful comments were received from a myrick freeman iii john tschirhart and james murdoch all conclusions are of course our sole responsibility

can contingent valuation measure nonuse values the authors outline how potentially coherent consistent economic values can be determined by use of contingent valuation measurement cvm they use as an example three different cv studies to estimate nonuse values for groundwater the authors also point out that rapidly changing political preferences can complicate the issues they feel that the appropriate goal for cvm is to attempt to provide crystallized values for public decisionmaking

core structure and comparative statics in a hybrid matching market abstract flexible firms compete by means of wages in the assignment market while rigid firms have no flexibility over terms of appointment in the marriage market workers trade with both kinds of firms in the hybrid market examples show that standard results that characterize the core of the marriage market respectively assignment market are not robust to the entrance of flexible respectively rigid firms to this market a new algebraic structure provides a different characterization for the core of the hybrid model and reflects a sort of robustness to the exit of rigid respectively flexible firms from this market meaningful comparative static results are derived

eliciting preferences to assign positions and compensation abstract we describe strategy proof rules for economies where an agent is assigned a position e g a job plus some of a divisible good for the 2 agent 2 position case we derive a robust characterization for the multi agent position case many arbitrary such rules exist so we consider additional requirements by also requiring coalitional strategy proofness or nonbossiness the range of a solution is restricted to the point that such rules are not more complex than those for the shapley scarf housing model no divisible good third we show that essentially only constant solutions are immune to manipulations involving bribes finally we demonstrate a conflict between efficiency and strategy proofness the results extend to models without externalities in which agents share positions journal of economic literature classification numbers c72 d70

competitive equilibria in two sided matching markets with general utility functions we present an exact characterization of utilities in competitive equilibria of two sided matching markets in which the utility of each agent depends on the choice of partner and the terms of the partnership potentially including monetary transfer examples of such markets include sellers and buyers or jobs and workers demange and gale showed that the set of competitive equilibria in this type of market forms a complete lattice with each extreme point of the lattice representing an equilibrium with the highest utilities for the agents on one side and the lowest utilities for the agents on the opposite side our characterization is based on establishing a connection between the competitive equilibria of a market and the competitive equilibria of certain strict subsets of that market each obtained by removing exactly one agent this characterization captures the effect of competition when agents are added to the market or removed from the market it gives a precise procedure for constructing competitive eq

matching with contracts we develop a model of matching with contracts which incorporates as special cases the college admissions problem the kelso crawford labor market matching model and ascending package auctions we introduce a new law of aggregate demand for the case of discrete heterogeneous workers and show that when workers are substitutes this law is satisfied by profit maximizing firms when workers are substitutes and the law is satisfied truthful reporting is a dominant strategy for workers in a worker offering auction matching algorithm we also parameterize a large class of preferences satisfying the two conditions

foreign aid taxes and public investment a comment abstract in a paper recently published in this journal gang and khan 1991 analysed the relationship between foreign aid and the fiscal behavior of the indian government a number of behavioural equations were estimated each derived from a utility maximizing theoretical framework this paper identifies and seeks to correct some inconsistencies in this framework

auctions experiments and contingent valuation laboratory experiments are a welcome development that promise to make a significant contribution to the study of economic behavior heiner 1985 plott 1982 smith 1982 1985 while relatively new to economics controlled laboratory studies of human behavior have long constituted the core of experimental psychology where there is a wealth of methodological experience from which experimental economists might profitably draw in particular current attempts to apply laboratory auction methods to valuing nonmarket environmental goods would be improved by more rigorous experimental design and data analysis procedures

a competitive partnership formation process a group of heterogeneous agents may form partnerships in pairs all single agents as well as all partnerships generate values if two agents choose to cooperate they need to specify how to split their joint value among one another in equilibrium which may or may not exist no agents have incentives to break up any existing partnerships or form new partnerships this paper proposes a dynamic competitive adjustment process that always either finds an equilibrium or exclusively disproves the existence of any equilibrium in finitely many steps when an equilibrium exists partnership and revenue distribution will be automatically and endogenously determined by the process moreover several fundamental properties of the equilibrium solution and the model are derived

reversal of asymmetries of allocation mechanisms under manipulation abstract consider a two person economy in which resources are allocated so as to maximize agent 1 s utility subject to the condition that agent 2 remains at least as well off as he was initially we show that agent 1 who is explicitly favored by the mechanism gains nothing by manipulation while agent 2 can reverse the asymmetry of the mechanism in his favor we give two other examples of mechanisms for which an analogous reversal of asymmetries takes place

implementation of stable solutions to marriage problems abstract this note analyzes the possibility of implementing stable outcomes for marriage markets our first result shows a contradiction between the use of stable mechanisms and the hypothesis of agents behavior considered in the nash equilibrium concept we analyze the possibility of implementing two sets of stable allocations by employing two types of mechanisms the first mechanism is a now or never choice process that permits us to implement in undominated nash equilibria the set of all the stable allocations the second choice process is the classic algorithm in matching theory the gale shapley mechanism a reversal property is observed in such a mechanism when agents act strategically the use of a mechanism which selects the best solution for one side of the market in the absence of strategic behavior yields the best stable solution for the agents on the other side under dominance solvability journal of economic literatureclassification numbers c72 d78 j41

consistent bargaining conjectures in marriage and matching abstract in this model of bargaining in marriage markets we assume that each couple bargains in a systematic way over the distribution of the utility of their marriage and that each market participant has accurate conjectures about the utility he or she could obtain through a similar bargaining process with every other potential partner this paper formulates the bargaining model characterizes consistent conjectures and characterizes the matchings which are stable with respect to these conjectures

the strategy structure of two sided matching markets we study two sided markets in which agents are buyers and sellers or firms and workers or men and women the agents are to form partnerships which provide them with satisfaction and at the same time make monetary transfers e g salaries or dowries the core of this market game is shown to have a particularly nice structure so that precise answers can be given to questions concerning comparative statics and manipulability the idea of using walrasian equilibrium as a mechanism for making allocations with desirable properties of fairness and efficiency has been studied extensively the scheme involves having agents specify their supply and demand functions the competitive equilibria are then calculated and allocations are made accordingly in general this procedure may run into two difficulties first nonuniqueness if there are several equilibria there may be no fair way to decide which one should be implemented and second manipulability if there is only one equilibrium an informed agent may be able to influence it by suitably falsifying his demand data however as we will show here using the walrasian mechanism does work remarkably well for a certain class of important markets these are the matching markets of our title and they include markets for single items like houses where it is assumed that traders do not wish to acquire more than one item they also include labor markets in which it is desired to match workers with jobs at suitable salaries academic markets in which students are to be assigned to educational institutions marriage markets where men and women are matched through negotiating of dowries it turns out that in these markets both the problems of nonuniqueness and manipulability can be resolved in a

the fiscal effects of aid in ethiopia evidence from cvar applications abstractthis article explores the fiscal effects of aid in ethiopia using the cointegrated vector auto regressive cvar methodology to model complex long run and short run dynamics we use national data for 1961 2010 including a measure of aid capturing flows through the budget as measured by the recipient the data suggests three main conclusions on the long run equilibrium first government long term spending plans are based on domestic sources treating aid as an additional source of revenue second both grants and loans are positively related to tax revenue third aid is positively associated with spending with a particularly strong relation between capital expenditure and grants overall our results show that aid in ethiopia had beneficial fiscal effects

multi item vickrey english dutch auctions abstract assuming that bidders wish to acquire at most one item this paper defines a polynomial time multi item auction that locates the vcg prices in a finite number of iterations for any given starting prices this auction is called the vickrey english dutch auction and it contains the vickrey english auction sankaran j k 1994 on a dynamic auction mechanism for a bilateral assignment problem math soc sci 28 143 150 and the vickrey dutch auction mishra d parkes d 2009 multi item vickrey dutch auctions games econ behav 66 326 347 as special cases by means of numerical experiments it is showed that when the auctioneer knows the bidders value distributions the vickrey english dutch auction is weakly faster than the vickrey english auction and the vickrey dutch auction in 89 percent and 99 percent respectively of the investigated problems a greedy version of the vickrey english dutch auction is demonstrated to perform even better in the simulation studies

hedonic prices goods specific effects and functional form inferences from cross section time series data tests for two key elements of the hedonic model of price determination for differentiated goods are proposed when cross sectional time series data are available first the hedonic hypothesis that price is determined by sellers and buyers valuations of characteristics bundled in a good is tested against the alternative that consumers demand specific goods the sensitivity of the outcome of the test to unmeasured characteristics serial correlation or heteroscedasticity and misspecification of functional form is assessed second a novel approach to testing functional form illustrates limitations of testing hedonic specifications only against alternatives nested in the box cox functional form

hedonic prices property values and measuring environmental benefits a survey of the issues this paper provides a review of the theoretical basis and the assumptions required in order to use hedonic price equations derived from property value data to obtain measures of the prices and the inverse demand functions for environmental amenities such as air quality it also includes a review and assessment of existing empirical applications of the technique to problems of air and water quality and urban noise

exploring the relationship between the markets for new and used durable goods the case of automobiles given that durable products are long lived there exists the possibility of secondary markets for used products as well as the potential for product obsolescence this is an important issue in markets where technology changes rapidly because the introduction of new versions of a product can make earlier versions obsolete more generally prices of older versions in the secondary market adjust in response to changes incorporated in new versions of the product thus another method of evaluating consumers response to a new product is by looking at the variation in market prices of the old product this paper develops a general model to explore the relationship between primary markets for new cars and secondary markets for used cars the results suggest that the depreciation of used cars is influenced strongly by the types of changes in new model cars

fuel demand on uk roads and dieselisation of fuel economy abstract because of high oil prices and climate change policy governments are now seeking ways to improve new car fuel economy thus contributing to air quality and energy security one strategy is to increase dieselisation rates of the vehicle fleet recent trends in fuel economy show improvement since 1995 however efforts need to go further if the eu voluntary agreement targets on co 2 a greenhouse gas emission standard are to be achieved trends show diesel car sales have accelerated rapidly and that the advantage of new car fuel economy of diesel cars over gasoline ones is narrowing posing a new challenge we estimate the demand for new car fuel economy in the uk in the long run consumers buy fuel economy but not in the short run we found that long term income and price changes were the main drivers to achieve improvements particularly for diesel cars and that there is no break in the trend of fuel economy induced by the agreement adopted in the 1990s policy should target more closely both consumer choice of and use of diesel cars

estimation of a hedonic price equation for bordeaux wine does quality matter in this paper the hedonic price technique is applied to bordeaux wine in the hedonic price function we include not only the objective characteristics appearing on the label of the bottle but also the sensory characteristics of the wine our data come from an experimental study in which juries have evaluated and graded a sample of bordeaux wines the estimation of the hedonic price equation shows that the market price is essentially determined by the objective characteristics the estimation of a jury grade equation shows that quality unlike the market price is essentially determined by the sensory characteristics

the demand for car fuel efficiency some evidence for the uk this paper uses the atkinson halvorsen 1984 hedonic method to estimate the effect of petrol price changes on fuel efficiency and other attributes using data for new cars in the uk in contrast to atkinson and halvorsen the estimated long run petrol price elasticity of demand for fuel efficiency is very small the empirical results imply that the adjustment process within the new car market permits little substitution for more fuel efficient cars in response to petrol price changes

automobiles and implicit markets an estimate of a structural demand model for automobile characteristics economists have always found it difficult to investigate the demand for the automobile good due to its heterogeneity in this paper the automobile is treated as a differentiated product and a two step approach is used to estimate a system of structural demand equations for automobile attributes the obtained results are statistically sound and in conformity with theoretical expectations this should be taken as an indication of the validity and robustness of the procedure used in this analysis

entry and structures of interest groups in assignment games abstract this paper presents several comparative statics results concerning the entry problem in assignment games the results compare sets of equilibria and hence do not require the usual assumption of a unique equilibrium by the device of a competing group generator the set of players is decomposed into three interest groups for which three forms of entry effects are identified for the group with the strongest entry effect it is found that generically 1 the benefit functions form a complete ordering and 2 the turnover effect dominates the unemployment effect the implications of these results to bargaining immigrations and matching problems are discussed

energy and depletable resources economics and policy 1973 1998 abstract this paper reviews the impact of the literature in depletable resources and energy economics over the period 1973 1998 particularly the initial period of publication of the journal of environmental economics and management 1974 1998 a discussion of prominent policy issues in this arena is provided along with an indication of what academic economics papers have contributed to that debate this is followed by a citation analysis of contributions in the fields of energy and exhaustible resource economics for each of these two fields a list of the top papers in each five year period from 1974 to 1998 is presented along with a list of the top journals in each decade based on average citations per article the top ten cited articles in the fields in the journal of environmental economics and management are also presented

non manipulable house allocation with rent control in many real life house allocation problems rents are bounded from above by price ceilings imposed by a government or a local administration this is known as rent control because some price equilibria may be disqualified given such restrictions this paper proposes an alternative equilibrium concept called rationing price equilibrium tailored to capture the specific features of housing markets with rent control an allocation rule that always selects a rationing price equilibrium is defined and it is demonstrated to be constrained efficient and group non manipulable for almost all preference profiles in its bounding cases the rule reduces to a number of well known mechanisms from the matching literature in this sense the housing market with rent control investigated in this paper integrates several of the predominant matching models into a more general framework

connecting the cooperative and competitive structures of the multiple partners assignment game multiple partners assignment game is the name used by sotomayor the multiple partners game in m majumdar ed equilibrium and dynamics essays in honor of david gale the macmillan press ltd new york 1992 the lattice structure of the set of stable outcomes of the multiple partners assignment game int j game theory 28 1999 567 583 to describe the cooperative structure of the many to many matching market with additively separable utilities stability concept is proved to be different from the core concept an economic structure is proposed where the concept of competitive equilibrium payoff is introduced in connection to the equilibrium concept from standard microeconomic theory the paper examines how this equilibrium concept compares with the cooperative equilibrium concept properties of interest to the cooperative and competitive markets are derived

fair allocation of indivisible goods and criteria of justice a set of n objects and an amount m of money is to be distributed among m people example the objects are tasks and the money is compensation from a fixed budget an elementary argument via constrained optimization shows that for m sufficiently large the set of efficient envy free allocations is nonempty and has a nice structure in particular various criteria of justice lead to unique best fair allocations that are well behaved with respect to changes of m this is in sharp contrast to the usual fair division theory with divisible goods