Mathematical Social Sciences最新文献

We study the problem of fairly allocating indivisible goods to agents with weights corresponding to their entitlements. Previous work has shown that, when agents have binary additive valuations, the maximum weighted Nash welfare rule is resource-, population-, and weight-monotone, satisfies group-strategyproofness, and can be implemented in polynomial time. We generalize these results to the class of weighted additive welfarist rules with concave functions and agents with matroid-rank (also known as binary submodular) valuations.

The static analysis shows that a merger among complementary input suppliers or complementary patent holders benefits the consumers and the society by reducing the input prices. We show that the effects of a merger of complements are not so straightforward in a dynamic set up with endogenous product differentiation in the final goods market. The merger of complements reduces the total input prices and increases product differentiation. However, whether it increases or decreases consumer surplus and welfare depends on the market expansion following product differentiation, the number of merged input suppliers and the intensity of competition. Hence, in a dynamic setup with endogenous product differentiation, the antitrust authorities may need to be more careful about mergers of complements. Our analysis has also relevance for vertical mergers.

We consider a market of technology transfer and licensing with an outside innovator and two asymmetric potential licensees where the licensees have asymmetric absorptive capacities of a cost reducing innovation. The low-cost efficient licensee/firm can only benefit from the new technology if the size of the cost reducing innovation is strictly bigger than the cost difference from its competitor. The high-cost firm always benefits from the new technology regardless of the size of the innovation. This leads to the possibility of strategic shelving of the innovation by the efficient firm. Under this backdrop, we characterize the optimal licensing contracts of the outside innovator. We find that in equilibrium, the innovator will use a fixed fee contract for some parameters and royalty or two-part tariff contract(s) for other parameters. Equilibrium fixed fees and royalty rates will also vary depending on the cost asymmetry and the size of the innovation. The optimal licensing contracts can be exclusive or non-exclusive, and shelving of the new technology may or may not happen which has welfare implications. We also investigate the first- and second-best licensing contracts in this environment and discuss their possible implementation.

It is well known that in assignment markets competitive prices always exist, but no price mechanism is strategy-proof for all agents. We investigate the extent a single agent can influence three special competitive price vectors by misreporting his/her reservation values. We provide an exact formula how the minimum, the maximum, and the fair competitive price vectors change, and show that at the fair prices no agent can gain more than half of the deviation from the true values. We also derive the analogous results for the corresponding core payoffs of the associated assignment game via graph-theoretic characterizations of the two side-optimal core payoffs.

A non-Bayesian decision maker forms posterior beliefs through an – ever so slightly – violation of Bayes’ rule. A naive equilibrium is a competitive equilibrium for a multiperiod complete markets economy such that every economic agent – Bayesian or non-Bayesian – assumes that all economic agents are Bayesian decision makers. If all agents are indeed Bayesian decision makers, the naive equilibrium coincides with the standard concept of an arbitrage-free equilibrium for which dynamic price ratios are comprehensively pinned down as the equilibrium price ratios of Arrow–Debreu securities in a static economy. If at least one agent is a non-Bayesian decision maker, however, some equilibrium price ratios will change over time. These changing price ratios imply the existence of unrealized dynamic arbitrage opportunities in a naive equilibrium with non-Bayesian decision makers.

We model the situation where a borrower can choose to acquire costly information about the outcome before implementing a risky project. The borrower is resource-constrained and faces a trade-off between incurring the cost of information or putting effort into the project. We provide novel insights about the type of project the borrower chooses and identify the conditions under which the borrower acquires information. We characterize the optimality conditions for the interest rate charged by a socially-motivated as well as a profit-motivated lender. We find that if the interest rate is high, the borrower is likely to choose riskier projects and acquire information about the outcome. If capital is moderately expensive for the lender, even the socially-motivated lender charges a higher interest and makes a positive profit. This provides an alternate explanation for the prevalence of high-interest rates in the rural credit market, despite the presence of socially-motivated lenders.

This paper studies the optimal duration of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits in a job search model where a risk neutral UI agency cannot monitor the search effort of risk-averse workers. Unemployment assistance benefits for noneligible unemployed are taken as exogenous by the unemployment agency which chooses optimally the constant level of UI benefits, the date of their exhaustion and the constant level of the financing tax. So, due to possible finite values of the duration of unemployment benefits, the resulting agency’s problem involves nonstationarities that appears somewhat difficult to solve from the analytical viewpoint. Based upon the geometric properties of the incentive and budget constraints, we successfully provide two explicit sufficient conditions regarding the parameters of the model for obtaining a positive and finite optimal duration of UI. We then give a theoretical rationale for most unemployment insurance systems.

This article presents a three-stage non-cooperative disclosure decision game (DDG), in which R&D-investing firms choose whether to disclose R&D-related information to the rival in a Cournot-like environment. Though firms have no (private) incentive to disclose information unilaterally on their cost-reducing R&D activity to prevent a rival from engaging in free appropriation, this work reveals opportunity for the government to design an optimal policy aimed at incentivising R&D disclosure. Following this welfare-improving path, sharing R&D-related information becomes a Pareto-efficient Nash equilibrium strategy. These findings suggest that using public subsidies to R&D disclosure can lead to a win-win result, eliminating the unpleasant non-disclosing outcome from a societal perspective.

A group of students who have applied for scholarships must be ranked. The committee responsible for determining this ranking consists of the students’ advisors. While impartial towards other students, the advisors are biased towards favoring their students. This paper examines the implementation of the deserving ranking via backward induction. Some of the best-known sequential mechanisms utilized in the real world are ineffective. We present two simple and natural sequential mechanisms that prove to be effective. The first mechanism is suitable for when there are precisely three students, and the second is for four or more students.

This paper investigates the nexus between foreign aid (in both forms: grant and loan), poverty trap, and economic development in a recipient country by using a Solow model with two new ingredients: a development loan and a fixed cost in the production process. The presence of this fixed cost generates a poverty trap. We show that foreign aid may help the country to escape from the poverty trap and converge to a stable steady state in the long run, but only if (i) the country’s characteristics, such as saving rate, initial capital, governance quality, and productivity are good enough, (ii) the fixed cost is relatively low, and (iii) the loan rule is generous enough. We also show that our model with foreign aid has room for endogenous cycles, unlike the standard Solow model.