Journal of Public Economic Theory最新文献

This paper presents a “behavioral” model of a normative benevolent social planner, who faces a self-control problem when he/she is in charge of aggregating diverse and conflicting preferences of individuals. The model is presented in the context of aggregating preferences over intertemporal streams of social outcomes, in which Zuber and Jackson and Yariv have shown the impossibility of a time-consistent and Paretian social objective function. Unlike previous studies, our investigation focuses on the compatibility of the Pareto condition with the impure social planner who has a dynamically consistent self-control utility function characterized by Gul and Pesendorfer. Assuming that the social planner is tempted to adopt the majority's opinion when there is a conflict of opinions among individuals, the paper characterizes an aggregation form in which the planner is allowed to depart from dictatorship in ex-post choice under noncommitment.

Using a Salop circle model, this research analyzes the welfare implications of firm/product entry with information provision by consumers. While firms use consumer information to target sales efforts, consumers face privacy trade-offs when providing their personal information. We show that (i) price and profit first increase, then decrease with more varieties; (ii) consumer welfare, affected by price, sales effort, privacy loss, and matching effects, first decreases, then increases with firm entry; (iii) equilibrium information is socially optimal given the number of varieties; and (iv) if the variable cost of providing sales assistance is low (high), free entry leads to too much (few) varieties and too little (more) information, from a social welfare standpoint.

This paper considers an oligopolistic market for a vaccine, characterized by negative network effects, which stem from the free-riding behavior of individuals engaged in a vaccination game. Vaccine markets often suffer from three imperfections: high concentration, network effects, and a health externality (contagion). The first conclusion of the paper is that the negative network externality is important as a market distortion, as it may lead to significant welfare losses. The second and main part of the paper develops a two-part per-unit subsidy scheme that a social planner could use to target both consumers and producers of vaccines. The scope of such a subsidy scheme to induce the firms to produce the first-best output without network effects (which is the most ambitious first-best target) is investigated. In many cases, while the first-best is attainable, it requires negative prices for vaccines, which amounts to rewarding consumers to induce them to vaccinate.

A sender wants to persuade multiple homogeneous receivers to vote in favor of a proposal. Before the vote sender commits to a signal which sends private, potentially correlated, messages to receivers that are contingent on the true state of the world. The best equilibrium for sender in the resulting incomplete information game is unappealing: all receivers vote in favor of sender's preferred outcome, irrespective of their message. We therefore focus on the equilibrium where receivers vote sincerely, that is they vote in favor of the outcome that is optimal given their posterior. We characterize the optimal public and the optimal private signal, both for the case where receivers are behavioral and vote sincerely as well as the case where such behavior is a Bayes–Nash equilibrium (BNE). For the optimal public signal, sincere voting is a BNE, but the optimal private signal is subject to the swing voter's curse. Imposing the constraint that sincere voting be a BNE leads to an optimal signal where receivers are never pivotal.

For a trading problem where a buyer is interested in an aggregate resource with fragmented ownership, the individually owned resources are perfect complements in trade. A double auction, chosen in accordance with a value alignment principle which we formulate, is shown to be strategy proof for owners. Since it also values the aggregate resource correctly, it mitigates the holdout problem by changing the source of inefficiency from complementarity on owners' side to lack of competition on buyer side. The value alignment principle implies that this double auction has a majority trading rule. With multiple buyers, a suitable modification makes the double auction strategy proof even for the buyers, thus mitigating the holdout problem by achieving approximate ex post efficiency when the number of owners is large.

The paper investigates the optimal strategy of a small open economy receiving foreign direct investment (FDI) in an optimal growth context. We prove that no domestic firm can enter the new industry when the multinational enterprise's productivity or the fixed entry cost is high. Nevertheless, the host country's investment stock converges to a higher steady state than an economy without FDI. A domestic firm enters the new industry if its productivity is high enough. Moreover, the domestic firm can dominate or even eliminate its foreign counterpart.

Moral rules and social norms influence whether individuals break the law. We characterize optimal law enforcement when some individuals obey internalized moral rules and implement social norms for other individuals who prefer to comply with them. Moral individuals and norm followers are linked via the endogenous social norm and this induces the social planner to create an expected sanction for norm setters that is higher than without the link. The optimal expected sanction for moral individuals is higher than the one for norm followers if the moral rule is weak but the reverse ranking is true when it is strong.

The energy transition requires the deployment of risky research and development programs, most of which are partially financed by public funding. Recent recovery plans, associated with the COVID-19 pandemic and the energy transition, increased the funding available to finance innovative low-carbon projects and called for an economic evaluation of their allocation. This paper analyzes the potential benefit of using repayable advance: a lump-sum payment to finance the project that is paid back in case of success. The relationship between the state and innovative firms is formalized in the principal-agent framework. Investing in an innovative project requires an initial observable capital outlay. We introduce asymmetric information on the probability of success, which is known to the firm but not to the state agency. The outcome of the project, if successful, delivers a private benefit to the firm and an external social benefit to the state. In this context a repayable advance consists in rewarding failure. We prove that it is a superior strategy in the presence of pure adverse selection. We investigate under what conditions this result could be extended in the presence of moral hazard. Implications for green industrial policy are discussed.

We analyze the patent licensing contracts offered by an insider innovator that has private information about the quality of innovation that can be transferred to two downstream firms. When information is complete, the first-best choice is a pure-royalty contract which is accepted by both firms (i.e., is nonexclusive). When information is incomplete, however, no nonexclusive contract can be supported as a separating equilibrium; it can only be the case where the innovator sells an exclusive contract to only one firm or a nonlicensing contract where no license is sold. In particular, when the gap in the innovation between the efficient and inefficient type is sufficiently small, there does not exist any separating equilibrium. It is sharply different from the case of an outsider innovation, in which a separating equilibrium always exists.