-
作者：Bierbrauer, Felix J.; Hellwig, Martin F.
作者单位：University of Cologne; Max Planck Society
摘要：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 d...
-
作者：Delavande, Adeline; Kohler, Hans-Peter
作者单位：University of Essex; Universidade Nova de Lisboa; University of Pennsylvania
摘要：We use probabilistic expectations data elicited from survey respondents in rural Malawi to investigate how risky sexual behaviour may be influenced by individuals' expectations about survival, and future HIV status, which in turn depend on the perceived impact of HIV/AIDS on survival, expectations about own and partner's current HIV status, and expectations about HIV transmission rates. Subjective expectations, in particular about mortality risk but not the risk of living with HIV, play an imp...
-
作者：Arcidiacono, Peter; Bayer, Patrick; Blevins, Jason R.; Ellickson, Paul B.
作者单位：Duke University; National Bureau of Economic Research; University System of Ohio; Ohio State University; University of Rochester
摘要：This article develops a dynamic model of retail competition and uses it to study the impact of the expansion of a new national competitor on the structure of urban markets. In order to accommodate substantial heterogeneity (both observed and unobserved) across agents and markets, the article first develops a general framework for estimating and solving dynamic discrete choice models in continuous time that is computationally light and readily applicable to dynamic games. In the proposed framew...
-
作者：Baliga, Sandeep; Ely, Jeffrey C.
作者单位：Northwestern University; Northwestern University
摘要：We study torture as a mechanism for extracting information from a suspect who may or may not be informed. We show that a standard rationale for torture generates two commitment problems. First, the principal would benefit from a commitment to torture a suspect he knows to be innocent. Secondly, the principal would benefit from a commitment to limit the amount of torture faced by the guilty. We analyse a dynamic model of torture in which the credibility of these threats and promises is endogeno...
-
作者：Augenblick, Ned; Nicholson, Scott
作者单位：University of California System; University of California Berkeley
摘要：In this article, we examine the effect of choice fatigue on decision making. We exploit a natural experiment in which voters face the same contest at different ballot positions due to differences in the number of local issues on their ballot. Facing more decisions before a given contest significantly increases the tendency to abstain or rely on decision shortcuts, such as voting for the status quo or the first-listed candidate. We estimate that, without choice fatigue, abstentions would decrea...
-
作者：Ritzberger, Klaus
摘要：This article studies a market game under uncertainty in which agents may submit multiple limit and market orders. When agents know their preferences at all states, the competitive equilibrium can be supported as a Nash equilibrium of the market game, that is, agents behave as if they were price takers. Therefore, if the associated competitive economy has a fully revealing rational expectations equilibrium, then so does the market game. This resolves the puzzle that agents behave as if prices w...
-
作者：Beath, Andrew; Christia, Fotini; Egorov, Georgy; Enikolopov, Ruben
作者单位：The World Bank; Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Northwestern University; National Bureau of Economic Research; Barcelona School of Economics; ICREA; Pompeu Fabra University; New Economic School
摘要：Voters commonly face a choice between competent candidates and those with policy preferences similar to their own. This article explores how electoral rules, such as district magnitude, mediate this trade-off and affect the composition of representative bodies and the quality of policy outcomes. We show formally that anticipation of bargaining over policy causes voters in elections with multiple single-member districts to prefer candidates with polarized policy positions over more competent ca...
-
作者：Kroft, Kory; Notowidigdo, Matthew J.
作者单位：University of Toronto; National Bureau of Economic Research; Northwestern University
摘要：We study how the marginal welfare gain from increasing the unemployment insurance (UI) benefit level varies over the business cycle. We do this by estimating how the moral hazard cost and the consumption smoothing benefit of UI vary with labour market conditions, which we identify using variation in the interaction of UI benefit levels with the unemployment rate within U.S. states over time. We find that the moral hazard cost is procyclical, greater when the unemployment rate is relatively low...
-
作者：Alfaro, Laura; Conconi, Paola; Fadinger, Harald; Newman, Andrew F.
作者单位：Harvard University; National Bureau of Economic Research; Universite Libre de Bruxelles; Center for Economic & Policy Research (CEPR); University of Mannheim; Boston University
摘要：A number of theories in organizational economics and industrial organization suggest that vertical integration, while costly, increases productivity. It follows from firms' maximizing behaviour that higher prices in the product market ought to induce more integration. Trade policy provides a source of exogenous price variation to assess this prediction: higher tariffs should lead to higher prices and, therefore, to more integration. We construct firm-level vertical integration indices for a la...
-
作者：Matejka, Filip
作者单位：Charles University Prague; Czech Academy of Sciences; Economics Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences
摘要：Prices tend to remain constant for a period of time and then jump. In the literature, this rigidity is usually interpreted to reflect a cost of adjusting prices. This article shows that price rigidity can alternatively reflect optimal price setting when there are no adjustment costs, namely, if the seller is rationally inattentive. The model generates non-trivial pricing patterns that are consistent with the data and that are hard to explain with the traditional adjustment-cost model. In parti...
