Journal of Public Economic Theory最新文献

We explore whether information on one's own social value orientation (SVO) impacts contributions in a public good game with leadership by example. In doing so, we compare the predictions of a model of belief-based preferences, where payoffs depend on first- and second-order beliefs on the contributions of others, and a model of internalized descriptive norms, where payoffs depend on deviation from an empirical norm. We argue that if pro-social behavior is driven by belief-based preferences, then private information on SVO should not impact contributions, but if the behavior is driven by internalized descriptive norms, then information on its own SVO should impact contributions. We report an experiment with three treatments: no information on SVO, binary information whether pro-self or pro-social, and SVO indicated on a scale from very pro-social to very pro-self. We observe no effect of information on contributions. This finding is inconsistent with internalized descriptive norms. We find that contributions are highest with a pro-social leader.

I examine the issue of implicit signaling of inexpressible types through delegation in a communication game with perfectly aligned preferences, two-sided private information, and communication frictions. A principal consults an agent to choose one of two actions. The principal has some tacit knowledge, which he cannot communicate, and may acquire some imperfect, costly signal about the state of the world. After observing the signal, the principal may choose to act or delegate to the agent, who observes the state of the world perfectly. Even if the principal's information acquisition and the signal are unobservable, the delegation, combined with private information, allows the agent to extract some information about the principal's tacit knowledge. I show that for a large class of parameters there exists an equilibrium, in which the agent (upon delegation) can correctly understand “cues” and tailor the action to the principal's needs. In particular, the agent's decision may be non-monotone in the state of the world.

This paper studies a class of games in which players' payoffs explicitly depend on their intrinsic preferences over the set of available alternatives, level of social interaction and the global influence of the aggregate societal choices. Using the potential functions approach, we examine the conditions under which the games admit a Nash equilibrium in pure strategies with a special emphasis on the role of social interactions. The existence results are then applied to examine the welfare consequences of the introduction of common goods and the adoption of new technologies.

The conditions of strong Condorcet winner consistency and strong Condorcet loser consistency are, in essence, universally accepted as attractive criteria to evaluate the performance of social choice functions. However, there are many situations in which these conditions are silent because such winners and losers may not exist. Hence, weakening these desiderata to extend the domain of profiles where they apply is an appealing task. Yet, the often-proposed and accepted weak counterparts of these properties suffer from the shortcoming that it is possible for all weak Condorcet winners to be weak Condorcet losers at the same time, thus leading to contradictory recommendations regarding their use as normative criteria. After arguing that this anomaly is pervasive, even in the presence of substantial and important domain restrictions, we propose to use intermediate notions of Condorcet-type winners and losers that are between these two extremes: their associated consistency requirements share the intuitive appeal of strong Condorcet winner consistency and strong Condorcet loser consistency and avoid the contradictory recommendations that may derive from the double identification of candidates as being weak Condorcet winners and losers at the same time. We examine the extent to which our intermediate consistency conditions are compatible with various additional attractive normative criteria. Finally, we introduce a class of social choice functions that are consistent with the recommendations of our new proposals and can be extended to the universal domain through the lexicographical use of complementary choice criteria, in the spirit of previous approaches by noted authors like Pierre Daunou and Duncan Black.

We study an allocation problem in which students share school preferences but differ in their outside options. We examine the ex-ante Pareto efficient (and weakly fair) allocations. Their main qualitative property is positive sorting; students with higher outside options are assigned to better schools. This result points out the tension between the policy goals of desegregation and efficiency and cautions policymakers about the difficulty of aligning these two objectives.

This paper analyzes the relationship between income distribution and social welfare when multiple pure public goods are privately provided. With a single public good and identical preferences, an increase in income inequality raises social welfare when it reduces the set of contributors so equality cannot be social optimal. We explore how this result is modified when there are multiple privately-provided public goods. It is shown that regions of neutrality alternate with regions of non-neutrality as income distribution is varied. In particular, in the setting of multiple privately-supplied public goods with non-idential preferences a region of non-neutrality emerges when individuals contribute to different public goods or when only one individual contributes. Moreover, social welfare will always be maximized by an income distribution located in a region of non-neutrality. This result implies that social welfare has local maxima at income distributions with inequality as well as around the equal income distribution. We also explore how the optimal extent of inequality is dependent on preference parameters.

Using a simple model of family decision making we examine the processes by which the wealth distribution changes over the generations, focusing in particular on the division of fortunes through inheritance and the union of fortunes through marriage. We show that the equilibrium wealth distribution exists under standard assumptions and has a Pareto tail that can be characterized in a simple way for a variety of inheritance rules and marriage patterns. The shape of the distribution is principally determined by the size distribution of families. We show how changes in fertility, inheritance rules and inheritance taxation affect long-run inequality.

In this paper, we contribute to the topical debate on the welfare effects of a centralized policy setting within the federal union in the presence of transboundary pollution externalities that affect production possibilities. It is shown that when the production of federal jurisdictions generates spillover effects, which in turn result in spillback effects, harmonization of their public policies towards the uniform optimal cooperative level does not ensure welfare improvement for the federation. We analyze and identify federal policies harmonizing reforms that deliver Pareto improvement in the presence of spillback in addition to spillover effects. These reforms are designed to neutralize all the spillback effects by maintaining the aggregate level of spillover effects constant while increasing the welfare of the federation. This result holds irrespective of the nature and sign of the spillover and spillback effects, as well as for both small and large open economies.