Economic Theory最新文献

We consider a sender who wishes to persuade multiple receivers to vote in favor of a proposal and sends them private correlated messages that are conditional on the true state of the world. The receivers share a common prior, wish to implement the outcome that matches the true state, and have homogeneous preferences. However, they are heterogeneous in their voting weights. We consider both behavioral and sophisticated voters. When voters are behavioral, public communication is optimal if and only if there is a veto player. For sophisticated voters, we establish lower bounds on the sender’s gain from persuasion for general voting quotas and show that the sender can often improve upon public communication. Finally, in an extension, we show that even when behavioral voters have heterogeneous prior beliefs, public communication is optimal if and only if there is a veto player.

It is often argued that inequality may worsen coordination failures as it exacerbates conflicts of interests, making it difficult to achieve an efficient outcome. This paper shows that this needs not to be always the case. In a context in which two interacting populations have conflicting interests, we introduce ex-ante inequality, by making one population stronger than the other. This reduces the cost of miscoordination for the weakest population, and at the same time it makes some equilibria more equitable than others, thus more focal and attractive for inequality-averse players. Hence, both social preferences and strategic risk considerations may ease coordination. We provide experimental support for this hypothesis, by considering an extended two-population Hawk–Dove game, where ex-ante inequality, number of pure-strategy equilibria, and cost of coordination vary across treatments. We find that subjects coordinate more often on the efficient outcomes in the treatment with ex-ante inequality.

Immigrants in economies with a dominant native language exhibit substantial heterogeneities in language acquisition of the majority language. We model partial language acquisition as an equilibrium phenomenon. We consider an environment where heterogeneous agents from various minority groups choose whether to acquire a majority language fully, partially, or not at all, with varying communicative benefits and costs. We provide an equilibrium characterization of language acquisition and demonstrate that partial acquisition can arise as an equilibrium behavior. We also show that a language equilibrium may exhibit insufficient learning relative to the social optimum. Finally, we formulate a deterministic language learning dynamic process and find that our language equilibrium arises in the long run under suitable conditions.

Using a simple microfounded macroeconomic model with price making firms and a central bank maximizing the welfare of a representative household, we show that the presence of firms’ motivated beliefs has stark consequences for central banks’ optimal communication and stabilization policies. Under pure communication, motivated beliefs overweighting the accuracy of firms’ private information may reverse the bang-bang solution of transparency found in the literature under objective beliefs and lead to intermediate levels of communication. Similarly, when communication and stabilization policies are combined, motivated beliefs overweighting firms’ ability to process idiosyncratic information in general may reverse the bang-bang solution of opacity applying under objective beliefs, leading again to intermediate levels of communication and stabilization.

Resource transfers are integral parts of climate negotiations as they affect incentives to participate in climate agreements. Whether to use transfers contingent on observing low emissions or on investment in green compliance technology is an open question. Using a repeated-game model with investment in green technology and resource transfers, we find that, because investments take time to fully affect emission incentives, there is a tradeoff. Investment-based agreements, where transfers are provided before emissions are realized but after investments have been undertaken, maximize the scope of cooperation. Emissions-based agreements, however, minimize the size of transfers whenever they foster cooperation.

In product markets, substantial price dispersion exists for transactions of physically identical goods. Moreover, in these markets, incumbent firms sell at higher prices than entrants. This paper presents a theory of price formation under dynamic competition that explains these facts by assuming both that consumers have imperfect access to firms and that their degree of access depends on each firm’s sales history. The model has a unique equilibrium that features randomized pricing strategies, with incumbents always posting higher prices than entrants. For a fixed underlying environment, the equilibrium converges to a stationary equilibrium over time. As firms’ entry and exit rates approach zero, this stationary equilibrium converges to perfect competition.

Does pre-voting group deliberation improve majority outcomes? To address this question, we develop a probabilistic model of opinion formation and deliberation. Two new jury theorems, one pre-deliberation and one post-deliberation, suggest that deliberation is beneficial. Successful deliberation mitigates three voting failures: (1) overcounting widespread evidence, (2) neglecting evidential inequality, and (3) neglecting evidential complementarity. Formal results and simulations confirm this. But we identify four systematic exceptions where deliberation reduces majority competence, always by increasing Failure 1. Our analysis recommends deliberation that is ‘participatory’, ‘neutral’, but not necessarily ‘equal’, i.e., that involves substantive sharing, privileges no evidences, but might privilege some persons.

We consider classical problems of fair division and generalize the standard requirement on solution mappings known as “replication invariance”. Consider an economy and an allocation chosen by a solution for it. Allowing the replication parameter to vary from agent to agent, we correspondingly adjust the social endowment so that it be possible to assign to each agent and their clone(s) what the agent has been assigned at the allocation under consideration. We require that this list of assignments be chosen by the solution mapping for the resulting economy . We show various ways in which this property is related to other properties that have been discussed in the literature on economic design. We characterize the “Walrasian solution operated from equal division” on the basis of efficiency, the equal-division-lower-bound, and this property, thereby obtaining an analog of the Debreu, Scarf (Int Econ Rev 4:235–246, 1963) convergence theorem in which the no-blocking requirements that define the core are replaced by the equal-division-lower-bound. For the problem of allocating a social endowment of a single commodity among a group of agents with single-peaked preferences (Sprumont in Econometrica 59:509–519, 1991), we characterize the so-called “uniform rule” in a similar way.

This paper firstly shows that a wide range of asset pricing models, including full information and Bayesian rational expectations models, typically imply that agents use the long-run cointegration relationship between stock prices and fundamentals to forecast future stock prices. However, using several widely used survey forecast datasets, we provide robust new evidence that survey forecasts of aggregate stock price indices are not cointegrated with forecasts of fundamentals (aggregate consumption, dividend, and output), both at the consensus and individual level. We argue that it is crucial to relax investors’ common knowledge of the equilibrium pricing function to reconcile this finding.

How is order achieved in a realm in which every elite commands both economic and military resources, and no stable institutions of power exist? We depict coalition formation in the feudal world as a series of non-binding agreements between elites who can move in and out of the coalition, through peaceful and violent means. We derive conditions under which the realm unites under one rule — a grand coalition, or remains fragmented. We motivate our analysis with key historical episodes in medieval Europe, from the Frankish Kingdom in the 5th to 10th centuries and England in the 11th to 15th centuries.