Mathematical Social Sciences最新文献

We discuss horizontal mergers in a homogeneous good industry where firms compete à la Bertrand with increasing marginal production costs. We show that profitable mergers can occur even for lower post-merger prices with respect to the pre-merger scenario, thus implying an increase in consumer surplus. The driving force of the result is the ability of the merged entity cutting production costs by sharing the output among its plants. This output rationalization effect can compensate for the revenue loss due to the merged entity producing less than the cumulated pre-merger production of the merging parties.

The note presents a counter example to Li (2023).

This paper examines how the public’s expectations for the chair of the monetary policy committee influence policy outcomes. We show that the expectation that the chair will propose their ideal policy at the meeting can lead a majority of the committee to reject the policy change. The result suggests that the expectation of the chair’s agenda setting is a determinant of interest rate persistence.

In most economic applications of cooperative games, externalities prevail: the worth of a coalition depends on how the other players are organized. We show that there is a unique natural way of extending the prenucleolus to games with coalitional externalities. This is in contrast to the Shapley value and the core for which many different extensions have been proposed.

A classification is a surjective mapping from a set of objects to a set of categories. A classification aggregation function aggregates every vector of classifications into a single one. We show that every citizen sovereign and independent classification aggregation function is essentially a dictatorship. This impossibility implies an earlier result of Maniquet and Mongin (2016), who show that every unanimous and independent classification aggregation function is a dictatorship. The relationship between the two impossibilities is reminiscent to the relationship between Wilson’s (1972) and Arrow’s (1951) impossibilities in preference aggregation. Moreover, while the Maniquet-Mongin impossibility rests on the existence of at least three categories, we propose an alternative proof technique that covers the case of two categories, except when the number of objects is also two. We also identify all independent and unanimous classification aggregation functions for the case of two categories and two objects.

In this paper, we consider those voting situations in which each voter decides whether he or she approves each candidate. Given a list of such approvals, a “social preference function” picks a ranking of the candidates. We are interested in finding out which social preference functions are non-manipulable. We show that a particular social preference function, referred to as approval ranking, is more decisive than any other social preference functions satisfying completeness, neutrality, anonymity, and non-manipulability. In addition, we show that approval ranking is axiomatized by these four axioms and tie-breakability.

This paper considers an allocation problem with a finite number of objects and unit-demand agents. The main result is a characterization of a class of strategy-proof price mechanisms on a general domain where preferences over pairs of objects and houses are rational, monotonic, and continuous. A mechanism belongs to this class if and only if the price space is restricted in a special way and, given this restriction, that the mechanism selects minimal equilibrium prices.

We incorporate expressive utility into Börgers’ (2004) canonical symmetric model of costly voting. It is shown that, under reasonable conditions, there exist two types of Bayesian Equilibria, those in which voters vote instrumentally and those in which they vote expressively. We show that equilibria in which voting is expressive is characterized by higher turnout and higher welfare. It is also shown that, in contrast to Borgers, when voting is expressive, turnout is too low.

This article aims to demonstrate how a market exposed to a catastrophic event strives to find a balance between adaptation and mitigation policies through R&D strategies. Our analysis reveals that, within our framework, there exists no trade-off between adaptation and mitigation. Rather, the critical relationship exists between adaptation and pollution because adaptation (wealth accumulation) increases the growth rate of the economy, leading to a higher flow pollution due to the scale effect. We also investigate the long-run effects of pollution taxes on growth rates and the influence of the probability of catastrophic events on these outcomes. Our findings suggest that even with a higher likelihood of catastrophe, the economy can elevate its R&D endeavors, provided that the penalty rate stemming from an abrupt event remains sufficiently high and the economy confronts a risk of a doomsday scenario. Additionally, we illustrate that pollution taxes can foster heightened long-term growth, with the positive effects being more pronounced when the probability of catastrophe is elevated, assuming an adequately substantial penalty rate. Finally, we find that pollution growth can be higher with less polluting inputs due to a scale effect, a phenomenon akin to the Jevons-type paradox.

Social norms, the informal rules of society, and relational utility, e.g. utility generated by guilt, are mechanisms by which cooperation and coordination can be facilitated. Here we add relational utility, derived from social norms, to the standard utility functions for several classic games and find that the qualitative outcome of these games can be altered. We find that social dilemmas can be converted into coordination games that exhibit bistability, polymorphic states with non-zero degrees of cooperation can exist at equilibrium, and that intermediate levels of relational utility (i.e. when norms are only moderately enforced) can be optimal in promoting cooperation.