Journal of Public Economic Theory最新文献

We examine a firm maximizing a combination of profit and consumer surplus that engages in price discrimination between two groups under incomplete information about their willingness to pay. As the firm increases the weight placed on the consumer surplus of those demanding high-quality goods, the rent captured by this group increases. While this shift alters the price-quality bundle offered to consumers demanding low quality, it never increases their surplus. Importantly, the mixed objective function can enhance overall welfare, as the firm is more likely to serve both consumer groups rather than restrict sales to only the demanders of high quality.

This paper analyzes the coalition structure core when coalitions have a finite number of players in atomless NTU games. Kaneko and Wooders showed that when there are finite types of players the above notion of the core (the f-core) is nonempty. In this paper, we provide a direct proof of the above result using Kakutani's fixed-point theorem when the sizes of coalitions are not only finite but also bounded above. This condition simplifies the presentation of the model and the existence proof. Unlike previous work, we dispense with the comprehensiveness assumption in NTU games, thereby broadening the applicability of our result to include matching problems and hedonic coalition formation models. Furthermore, we show that, in the absence of comprehensiveness, f-core allocations may fail to exhibit equal treatment in payoffs for the same type of players. We also note that Scarf's nonemptiness result for the core of NTU games follows as a corollary of our main theorem.

This paper examines the optimal dynamic taxation of capital in the context of skill-biased technological change. The study reveals that the widening wage gap, coupled with the complementarity between consumption and leisure, provides a novel rationale for capital taxation. We demonstrate that taxing capital is beneficial in economies experiencing persistent skill-biased technological advancements, even if the capital is skill-neutral and the complementarity between consumption and leisure is time invariant. Converse results appear when leisure substitutes for consumption. Statistics-based optimal tax formulas are provided to show how the government can dynamically mitigate the impacts of various technological changes through the utilization of labor and capital income taxes.

This paper studies the optimal bailout coverage of a media firm. Driven by the incentive to lower its expected borrowing costs, the media firm's coverage tends to favor the banking sector. However, this pro-bank bias results in the same ex ante expected borrowing cost as truthful coverage. While bias reduces borrowing costs when a bailout provides no public benefit, it also leads to higher borrowing costs when a bailout serves the public interest. Ultimately, pro-bank media bias always harms the taxpayer's expected welfare. Moreover, greater financial fragility in the media sector increases the likelihood of bank failures that taxpayers would ideally seek to prevent.

This paper studies strategic effort disclosure in dynamic team contests. Two teams of two players compete in a Tullock contest with teammates' sequential efforts aggregated across two periods using a Cobb–Douglas production function. We examine how equilibrium efforts and winning probabilities are affected by the teams' communication policies: no communication, private communication (efforts shared internally with stage-2 teammates), and public communication (efforts disclosed to stage-2 rivals as well). To describe asymmetric information generated by privately observable efforts for each communication policy profile, we use a perfect Bayesian equilibrium with an appropriate belief refinement for multistage complete information games. In the unique positive-effort equilibrium, the optimal choice of a communication strategy differs for the favorite (the strong team) and the underdog (the weak team). Private communication only benefits the underdog team, fostering effort complementarity and improving their chances of winning and payoffs. In contrast, the favorite team prefers either public or no communication to deter rival efforts or avoid intrateam free-riding. Importantly, endogenous communication policies reshape competitive dynamics, with private disclosure of efforts serving as a strategic equalizer for weaker teams.