Journal of Public Economic Theory最新文献

This article develops a model of public good provision with social norms determined by network relationships. Individuals' wealth allocation preferences are guided by the benefit they obtain from a private good and a public good, and the social value they receive when following their neighbors in their contribution to the public good. We find conditions under which (i) redistributions of wealth will increase total giving if the transfer goes to the less norm-conformist agent, (ii) an increase in tastes for conformity of the weak contributors will increase total giving, and (iii) the deletion of a link between two contributors will increase total giving. Subsequently, examples in very small networks allow us to discuss how these results can help policymakers encourage the voluntary provision of public good.

We study Bayesian persuasion with local strategic substitutes in networks. A designer commits to a public signal to maximize total activity. Equilibria are characterized by the network's maximum $��\; ��k��$-insulated sets for each realization. We solve the optimal information structure and characterize beneficial persuasion. While agents individually prefer higher states, the designer's payoff is non-monotonic in the posterior mean due to substitution effects. This provides a rationale for downwardplaying mechanisms: revealing low states truthfully and mixing signals when high. Moreover, for tree, nested split, and core-periphery networks, the designer strictly benefits if the prior mean insulated set size is less than the highest state set size.

This study examines the strategic communication that occurs before voting under various voting rules. A group of imperfectly informed voters communicate before casting their votes in binary elections. The voters have partially conflicting interests: there is a correct candidate in some states of the world, while in others, voters disagree, and ideologies matter. This study demonstrates that truthful communication is never an equilibrium under any voting rule when the size of the electorate is sufficiently large.

This corrigendum amends the main results in Bhattacharya et al., henceforth BTS. We show that the closed-form solution in Proposition 3 of BTS is incorrect, and the individual contributions are nonlinear (rather than linear) in the cumulative collective contribution. In addition, when the impatience differential is large enough, the patient individuals (rather than impatient individuals) reduce the contributions as the project progresses toward completion. Finally, the project is completed earlier (rather than later) as we increase the difference in impatience.

Matching is a commonly used fund-raising tactic, whereby small donors have their donation to a charity matched via a fund established by large donors. I developed a model in which a single large donor decides whether to establish a matching fund or contribute to the public good via the voluntary contributions mechanism (VCM). The credibility of the matching fund is an endogenous component of the model. For a match to be credible, the organizer must have a credible promise not to top up the contributions of the small donors. If the number of small donors is sufficiently large, there always exists a matching fund that is both credible and leads to a Pareto improvement relative to the VCM. When the matching fund needs to satisfy an endogenous credibility constraint, all of the outcomes that are eliminated due to this constraint are outcomes under which small donors are worse off relative to the VCM. The matching fund is also compared with a raffle mechanism. As the number of small donors grows large, public good provision under the two mechanisms converges. However, the matching function outperforms the raffle when there is a finite number of small donors.

An assignment is rank efficient if there is no other assignment where the expected number of agents who received one of their top choices is weakly higher. We introduce new notions of rank efficiency for the random assignment problem and illustrate a hierarchy between them. In a rank-minimizing assignment, agents receive objects with a minimum rank on average. An ex-post rank efficient random assignment has at least one lottery over only rank efficient deterministic assignments. Thus, it could still have another lottery with some rank-dominated deterministic assignments in its support. If each deterministic assignment in any decomposition of a random assignment is rank efficient, we call it a robust ex-post rank efficient assignment. We demonstrate that rank-minimizing implies rank efficiency, which indicates (robust) ex-post rank efficiency. Moreover, we introduce a mechanism that provides an ex-post rank efficient random assignment. We also prove that ex-post rank efficiency is incompatible with strategyproofness or fairness in the sense of weak envy-freeness and equal division lower bound.

Salient features of major economies around the world, specifically in high-income countries, are graying population and declining fertility. Incorporating the quantity–quality tradeoff of children into an overlapping generations model, this paper presents an analysis of the effects of formal old-age support on fertility and economic growth. Because of health risks during old age, which might be too severe to be covered privately, some economically developed countries have public old-age support programs. Formal old-age support provision is regarded as involving management costs, for instance, caused by X-inefficiency in addition to labor costs. Findings demonstrate that when management costs are sufficiently small, formal old-age support raises the balanced economic growth rate, involving a smaller tax burden and freeing individual time from family old-age support, but it lowers fertility. Effects on the lifetime utility of individuals are indeterminate. By contrast, when management costs are high, the increased formal old-age support deters economic growth through a negative income effect. However, it also lowers the fertility rate. In this case, lifetime utility becomes lower. Our major finding is that, when the cost inefficiency of public support is not high, formal old-age support might increase long-term lifetime welfare of individuals, but it lowers fertility.